by Alice Taylor
At the bottom of an old linen press in an upstairs corridor is a collection of earthenware crocks. They are cream-coloured and brown-rimmed, solid, heavy, and not easily overturned. They were acquired many years ago when a jam factory, Ogilvie & Moore of Cork, ceased production. At the time I was running a guest house and felt that my guests should enjoy the pleasure of home-made marmalade for their breakfasts. So, every January, into these four-pound crocks was poured a waterfall of golden marmalade.
That need is now gone, and my reduced marmalade-making can be contained in recycled honey jars. And so the earthenware crocks have found another function: they are now Christmas window candle containers. Filled with wet sand from the nearby strand in Garretstown, they make extremely secure candle-holders, safe enough to pass any health and safety test, I think. Not everybody is convinced of that, because each year one of my practical sons assures me that one Christmas I am going to burn down the entire menagerie. However, that has yet to happen so a few days before Christmas a visit to Garretstown beach is on the agenda.
The seaside in winter is a bracing experience, striding along the beach with the wind whipping around your ears, bringing your hair into a whirl and vibrating your ears with the sound of the water pounding off the rocks. When the cold begins to penetrate the bones, it is time to fill up the bucket with sand and head for home. I am probably in contravention of some EU regulation, but Christmas must override their rules as it was there long, long before them.
While collecting sand it is difficult to resist the urge to pick up interesting stones, shells and odd bits of wood that somehow will find a place in the decorating scheme. This pre-Christmas visit to the sea is a great stimulant as it washes out the cobwebs of the mind and prepares us to be blown indoors for Christmas.
On the day before Christmas Eve, it is time to visit the upstairs press, haul out the heavy crocks and bear them down the stairs to the kitchen table. We are told by fitness gurus that it is very good for your health and fitness to have a stairs in your house to provide regular exercise. That may well be, but this crock-carrying is a severe test of stickatitness.
By the time the crock-moving project is complete, the kitchen table is laden with array of crocked candles. First they get an overhaul: paring the candles to remove surplus wax and trimming the wicks to bring them onto a level lighting plane. Candles past their light-up time are replaced. In some of the jars, the sand has subsided, and this is topped up from the bucket of Garretstown sand. Then a tour of all the window sills, where the jars, with their firmly sand-secured candles, are put in place. They are totally safe from causing an inferno as the jars are heavy and full of sand so there is no danger of them falling over. The curtains are usually drawn well back as the light is meant to shine unhindered into the darkness when they are lit on Christmas night.
The window of the seomra ciúin is a special assignment. Normally it is the camping site for miscellaneous books and objects of no fixed abode, but now all is cleared for a new encampment: the wooden crib. The box containing the wooden crib is borne from the Christmas press back down the corridor, and as it is no lightweight it is a relief to land it on the floor beside the window. This is to be a street-facing crib rather than a room-facing one. And, because it faces out onto the street, it requires constant traipsing in and out of the nearby front door to ascertain progress.
The occupants of the original crib in Bethlehem had to simply move in, but this stable has to be created from scratch. And, because the landscape in Bethlehem was no rose garden and the stable no luxury hotel with fitted carpet, jute bags and rocks are used to depict a rugged terrain. The figures are not the highly decorative models that grace more modern cribs but are solid, rugged, wooden interpretations of reality. There is no firm plan for the layout, but it begins with Mary and Joseph, then shepherds, a cow, a donkey and even camels brought from the Holy Land are gradually introduced. As the stable scene develops, it takes on a life of its own and is softened by winged angels and colourful birds. When all the personnel are in situ, two sand-filled jars with candles are placed in amongst them. Then lights are discreetly wound along between the rocks so that passing children can look in and enjoy the scene.
With all the windows holding a candle ready to be lit and to welcome Christmas, the final step is to hang the wreath on the front door. Over the years, the idea of a door wreath arose, was considered and was abandoned. Because we live on an extremely busy main road, the feasibility of the idea was questioned. Then, one year at DJ’s open house, the perfect door wreath had proved too great a temptation. It was a swirl of fine feathery pine adorned with tory tops or pine cones, simply gorgeous. The first Christmas the wreath went up, a cynical neighbour gloomily predicted, ‘That won’t last long there.’ But he was wrong, and every year the survival of this wreath maintains one’s faith in the goodness of human nature. Christmas brings out the best in all of us.
Back on the home farm, when I was a child, no decorations went up until Christmas Eve. It was the tradition of our house, and, I think, of all the neighbouring farmhouses at the time. That tradition is long gone, but I still feel that the month of the Holy Souls, as my mother termed November, belongs to them alone. Not a Christmas decoration is allowed to twinkle in my mind until the page showing December appears on the large calendar hanging on the back of my kitchen door. Before that, the only acknowledgement that Christmas is coming is the maturing mincemeat and puddings in Aunty Peg’s press and the Advent wreath on the kitchen table on which I light a candle each morning before breakfast.
This wreath was a gift from my beloved sister Ellen, who lived most of her life in Toronto but who spent many Christmases with us until cancer stole her away, just before Christmas a few years ago. The wreath, as well as being an acknowledgement of Advent, is a remembrance of her. Maybe it is also the opening of the first page of the memory book that is so much part of Christmas.
Though November is the month of remembrance, Christmas brings the pain of loss to the surface, especially a recent loss. One year, the day before Christmas Eve, I heard a tentative knock on the door. Almost inaudible. I waited for a few seconds, wondering if I had imagined it. Then it came again, slightly more pronounced. I happened to be sitting at my laptop in the front room, with the door beside me open into the hallway. I went quickly and opened the front door. Nobody there. Usually when this happens, the person has gone around the corner to the side door, thinking that I may be in the kitchen out of hearing range of the front door.
And, sure enough, the knock came just as I went up the steps from the kitchen to the side door. I was surprised and delighted to find Audrey standing outside. As she lives at the other end of the parish, our paths do not cross that often. A beautiful young mother of two little boys, her husband had died of cancer during the year. It had been one of those deaths that had brought together the entire parish in a spontaneous flood of sympathy and support. Since then, despite her deep anguish, Audrey had carried about her a glow of inner peace and other-worldliness. This would be her first Christmas without her husband and her boys’ first Christmas without their father. It was going to be a tough time for them.
She had come to get a book signed for her husband’s uncle who enjoyed reading my books. We made our way to the seomra ciúin to find a pen on my desk. There we sat and talked while outside the window non-stop Christmas traffic poured past. Beside us the log fire crackled in the stillness of the room. Audrey talked, and I listened. I knew better than to be a Johnny-Fix-It. Johnny-Fix-Its are no help to the bereaved.
Every road through grief winds its own painful journey. Audrey’s pain was tangible. Married to the love of her life for fifteen years, though they were sometimes overshadowed by his illness, they had shared wonderful love and togetherness. During that illness, Audrey, with her medical knowledge and warm personality, had been a tower of strength, carrying her two boys through the trauma of parting with their beloved father. Now that he was gone, she was stretching out to cover both parental rol
es. She was blessed to have two wonderfully supportive families, her husband’s and her own, and to be surrounded by a great community. It all helps, but when you grieve, your grief is your own. She carried it in the deep core of her being.
That evening, my friend Maura called, bearing a box. ‘Don’t be misled by the box,’ she cautioned. ‘It is only a few home-mades.’ But, to me, home-made is as good as it gets. Maura too had buried her husband during the year, and, while still deep in that grief, she had suffered the loss of another family member. She was endeavouring to be strong to support her bereaved daughter.
Maura is one of those dependable people who every year on Hospice Coffee Morning comes laden with her wonderful home baking. She is as constant as the Northern Star. Now, even though struggling to cope with the grind of constant sorrow, she had taken the time to make some of her wonderful baking in appreciation of the little bits of comfort we had exchanged over the past few months. Generous people like Maura are the living spirit of Christmas.
Later, I sat by the fire and thought of how difficult the prospect of Christmas can be for people who have been thrust onto the harsh road of grief during the year. Christmas looms up ahead like a towering roadblock that has to be scaled. The first time I had been in that position was a gut-wrenching experience. We were not in the aftermath of death that time but were waiting in its approaching shadow. A few days before that Christmas, our much-loved cousin Con, who had spent many Christmases with us, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was a quiet, gentle man. Many years earlier, when he began teaching in a school in a nearby town, he came to stay for a while. The ‘while’ turned into years, during which time he became part of our family. He was an oasis of peace and tranquillity in the midst of our busy household and was a listening ear and comforter in times of stress.
That year, he taught in his school up to the Christmas holidays, and then the bombshell came. Having gone to the doctor with what he thought was a bad flu, the diagnosis fell like the blow of a sledgehammer. His two brothers, who were priests in Dublin and Belfast, came to stay, and that night, as we gathered to light the Christmas candle, we all knew that it would be the last time for one of the circle around our hall table. Later that night, his brothers concelebrated mass in our church. I can still remember the deep pain and the sacredness of that mass.
A few years later, my husband Gabriel died suddenly in late November. After the initial shock, we gradually began to gather our wits about us. But Christmas loomed like a menacing spectre on the horizon. How would we cope with our grief in the midst of all the remembering and celebrations of previous Christmases? The dreaded hurdle proved surprisingly manageable, and, when the time came, mixed with the acute pain came unexplainable rays of divine ease. The prospect had been worse than the reality.
Another time, a few years after that again, I was in Heathrow on Christmas Eve, on my way to Toronto to spend Christmas with my sister. Due to an unexpected diagnosis, she was unable to travel. For years she had come home to Innishannon for Christmas, and now my daughter and I were travelling to bring home over to her. That Christmas morning in Toronto, we walked to mass through snow-covered streets, and the following night we went to the ballet and watched a magical performance of The Nutcracker. I can honestly say it is one of my loveliest memories. Mixed with the deep pain of impending departure was the sharing of this beautiful ballet.
The following year, after months of unsuccessful chemotherapy, I again travelled to Toronto to spend Christmas with her. It was not to be. She died in mid-December, and we brought her ashes home to Innishannon before Christmas. In grief, our senses are tuned in to the delicate fabric of another zone. At Christmas, Heaven moves a little closer, and a sacred bridge spans both worlds. On that holy night, our departed loved ones come closer.
When we were young, by the time Christmas Eve came we were like a tide held back by a strong wall that was now to burst open with a huge surge of enthusiasm. There was no holding us back. The house decorating, which had been held off until then, was about to begin. Bundles of holly and ivy were swept into the kitchen, and we buried everything in greenery.
My mother, ignoring all the mayhem around her, calmly began the ritual of stuffing the goose. Before the stuffing could commence, the goose was singed over a lighted paper – white for a cleaner flame – on the flagstone in front of the fire to remove any traces of soft downy wisps still clinging to its skin. Singeing had to be done swiftly and with perfect timing. The aim was to have a clear flame beneath the goose and to proceed with fast jerky movements. This was no time for slow motion because if you were not a fast mover you could finish up with a multicoloured goose. With the arrival of methylated spirits this became an easier task as the blue flame was clean and easy to manage. The exercise filled the kitchen with the whiff of scorched feathers. Afterwards, any tiny infringements that had escaped the inferno were diligently removed.
Earlier that day my mother had boiled a black pot of potatoes over the open fire, and when the potatoes began to break through their jackets, she swung the pot off the hangers and strained away the boiling water. When the potatoes were sufficiently cool to be peeled in comfort, a large green enamel dish was filled with steaming white floury potato while a galvanised bucket beside it filled up with skins. On top of the mound of potato she landed a generous lump of yellow butter which slowly melted, streaming down between the potatoes. Then came a waterfall of cooked onions, the peeling of which had brought a waterfall of tears down her face. All these were churned into a soft stuffing mixture. If she judged the mixture to be too dry she carefully added a few drops of liquid from the saucepan of cooked giblets boiled the night before and left to cool.
In another enamel basin my mother had put breadcrumbs made from the insides of a stale two-pound loaf to which she now added salt, pepper, cinnamon, mixed herbs and a very limited amount of sage. (She judged sage to be hard on the digestive system.) These herbs she rubbed between her palms just as my father rubbed the layers of tobacco he peeled off his plug prior to filling his pipe. Into this mixture she grated a large green cooking apple saved from my grandmother’s apple trees, which annually produced a large crop. She might then add a pinch of caster sugar to balance the flavour. If it was still not to her satisfaction, another dribble of the giblet juice could be added.
When the entire mixture was judged to be sufficiently flavoursome and of the correct consistency, she took it to the lower room off the kitchen, which, with its sub-zero temperature, was the nearest thing we had to a fridge. When the stuffing had completely cooled in the freezing temperatures of this room, my mother began the ritual of stuffing the goose. First to be done was the breast cavity and then the body. To prevent either bursting while cooking, she allowed sufficient room for expansion. Then, like a master surgeon, she stitched up her patient with her largest darning needle threaded with a soft white flax cord.
This cord had been the stitching along the tops of the flour bags when they came from the mill. It was carefully eased out when opening the bags, wound up into little balls and stored away in my mother’s sewing box for special jobs such as stitching up the Christmas goose. Because it was soft, it did not cut into the flesh of the goose, and it was less inclined to rip open in the cooking. My mother considered it better than her No. 10 sewing thread, which, though stronger than a No. 40, was a bit too rigid and unforgiving for the soft skin of her goose.
First to be stitched up was the breast, where my mother had allowed an ample flap for covering over the opening. The finished effect was neat, firm and almost invisible. Her sealing of the larger rear cavity was an exercise in master surgery in which she took huge pride. When the operation on her goose was complete, she stood back with a look of immense satisfaction on her face. The patient was then removed from the operating table, placed into the large green dish and covered with a well-washed, sun-bleached flour bag. The surplus stuffing was put into an earthenware basin and covered with butter paper held in place by a length of flax cord. The
goose and the bowl were then laid to rest on a table in the lower room to await the big day.
Already sitting on the table in the lower room was the ham. The previous morning it had been retrieved from the top of the barrel of pickle and well washed to remove all traces of salt. A salty ham was not to my mother’s liking. Then it was put into one of her heavy black pots and boiled gently for a long period over the fire. There was no set time for this boiling period; long years of experience guided the time, and when my mother judged that it was sufficiently cooked she swung the pot off the fire and carried it carefully to the chilly regions of the lower room, where she left it standing in its own water. There it rested overnight.
In the morning, she lifted it out of the pot and laid it on a large dish. She carefully eased off the skin and, with a large knife, criss-crossed the surface, creating diamonds. She then proceeded to plant a clove in each diamond. She mixed breadcrumbs, brown sugar and mustard, and, if the mixture was too dry, she added a few drops of the giblet water to bring it to the right consistency. She laid a coat of the mixture over the top of the ham, which was then returned to the empty pot and given a quick roast over the fire. Now the ham and goose lay in repose on the table in the lower room, on either side of the extra bowl of stuffing, all ready for the big occasion.
While my mother was thus engaged, we poked branches of holly behind holy pictures, between the bannisters of the stairs and along the meat hooks in the ceiling. Paper chains were strung around the kitchen, and a pleated paper went around the turnip holding the Christmas candle. It was my father’s job to procure the biggest turnip in the pit and scoop a hole in it to hold the large candle.
