The Night Before Christmas
Page 11
The cows also adopted the hens’ attitude, being fed in their stalls and only coming out once a day for water. The big job of the day was “tending the cows”. Large pikefuls of hay were drawn across the haggard from the hay-barn barn to the stalls and then the channel that ran along behind the cows was brushed out and the big dunghill outside the stalls grew larger. The cows no longer yielded milk, so the main work of the farmyard, the morning and evening milking, was no longer necessary. Below the cow-house the horses, too, remained in the stables and came out only for water; the hay was thrown in through the window above their mangers and they crunched with satisfaction as they stood on three legs and rested the fourth, in rotation.
The land and the animals rested and we rested with them. Once St Stephen’s Day had passed with its need for rising early to go hunting the wren, we slept late every morning and breakfast was usually at midday. The table was pulled up beside the fire so that we could make toast without having to move. It was a long and leisurely breakfast with books propped up against jugs, but the books were abandoned if Denis Brennan came on the radio to read a short story; his wonderful voice brought any story alive. Sometimes while we were still eating, Bill or some other neighbour called and the breakfast was further extended.
During the rest of the year, roving was normally done at night, but the days after Christmas were an exception to that rule. Now visitors came in the evening as the daylight waned and went home later when the moon had risen to light their way. We were all on our annual holidays, so we visited back and forth at odd hours. Town cousins came on their Christmas visit and we had a special tea in the parlour and stayed up late to entertain them. On those nights we had lemonade and biscuits after the tea and the adults had something stronger. Everybody had to sing to provide entertainment, which was a bit tough on the crows amongst us and harder still on the listeners. But the best night’s entertainment was when the big wrenboy group came for a house dance. They packed the kitchen and filled it with music and song and bounced off the stone floor in complicated sets.
In the nights after that dance Bill tried to teach us how to dance the sets to the music of a gramophone record. The gramophone remained in the kitchen for the duration of Christmas and we played it every night, replacing the worn brass needles with new ones from a small tin box with “His Master’s Voice” printed on the cover and the picture of a dog looking into a large horn. The new needles we had got for Christmas were stored in the gramophone beside the horn, which was lifted back and forth when the record was changed. Some times if my father had to go to town for the New Year he brought more new records, and one of these records had a song which began
Shake the holy water, close the door:
The banshee is around tonight.
I didn’t like this record at all because it scared me. Often around the fire at night the neighbours told ghost stories, and afterwards we would be so frightened going up the dark stairs with the candle that we imagined we saw all sorts of spooks watching us out of dark corners. On those nights we checked behind the door and under the bed for undesirable visitors. The man who specialized in ghost stories was Con, who lived across the river, and we loved it when he came, though it took us a few nights to recover from his visit. As we sat around the fire listening to his stories, I liked to sit beside my mother so that I could rest my head on her lap and she would run her fingers through my hair and massage my scalp. The soothing, comforting feeling made the ghost stories less frightening. Many of the emigrants home for Christmas came visiting and fascinated us with stories of London, New York and other far-away places.
On New Year’s Eve my mother placed another large candle in the window to welcome in the New Year. The Christmas candle was now well burnt down as she had lit it every night. This new candle signalled a new beginning and we felt that we were putting the old year behind us and were going to put our best foot forward for the New Year. Now instead of wishing each other Happy Christmas, the neighbours wished each other Happy New Year, which I regretted as I did not like the idea of Christmas being replaced. But on New Year’s Day, as on Christmas Day, we had a roast goose for the dinner and afterwards, as we had done every day since the snow had come, we fed the birds. We went out into the garden and scattered breadcrumbs on the snow under trees and then stood inside the kitchen window and watched them gather. Sometimes the crows swooped down and gobbled everything up in seconds so we had to maintain a supervisory eye on the feeding to guarantee fair play for the small ones. It was my dream to have a pet bird and I tried to capture one. Over the breadcrumbs outside the window I placed a box propped up by a stick and I tied a piece of string to the stick. I trailed the string across the garden path and in the kitchen window. The plan was that when a bird was under the box I would pull the string and the box would fall down and trap the bird. That was the theory but the practice resulted in broken sticks and cracked bits of string and airborne birds, so I came to the conclusion that I was not in the big game hunting league.
At night we sat around the fire reading books or playing cards. We played “forty-five”, “donkey”, “beggar-my-neighbour” and “a hundred and ten”. We played under Bill’s directions but did not take the games very seriously; as Bill himself took cards seriously, this annoyed him, and sometimes he banged down the cards and walked out on us. When this happened Dan used to say, “He’s a bigger child than any of them.” But Dan refused to play with us at all as he maintained that he would not be responsible for what he might do to us when we made mistakes. Bill was always back the night after, ready for another session. Snakes-and-ladders and ludo did not cause such friction and often we spent hours joining the dots in books of puzzles we had got from Santa, which Dan declared was the pastime of simpletons.
The last step of our Christmas journey came with Little Christmas and on Little Christmas Eve we lit our third and final candle in the window to replace the New Year candle. This was also Women’s Christmas, and Dan declared that it was typical of the women to have their celebrations on the last day as they had to have the last word on everything. We believed that this was the night that Our Lord had turned the water into wine, so later that night we checked the bucket of spring water that had been brought earlier from the well to see if it had been changed into wine; despite great expectations the miracle of Cana was never repeated in our kitchen. Mrs Casey for her part believed that the souls of the dead were close to us on that night, and though we were not quite convinced, we were still slow to go out into the darkness on our own.
The following day we had our last Christmas dinner in the fading magic of a departing Christmas. That was the final night on which a candle would light in our window: it had glowed for the twelve days of Christmas, and tomorrow we would take down the decorations.
About the Author
Alice Taylor lives in the village of Innishannon in County Cork, in a house attached to the local supermarket and post office.
Her classic account of growing up in the Irish countryside, To School Through the Fields, was published in May 1988. It was an immediate success, launching Alice on a series of signing sessions, talks, media appearances readings the length and breadth of Ireland. It quickly became the biggest selling book ever published in Ireland, and her sequels, Quench the Lamp, The Village, Country Days and The Night Before Christmas, were also outstandingly successful. Since their initial publication, these books of memoirs have also been translated and sold internationally.
In 1997 Alice’s first novel, The Woman of the House, was an immediate bestseller in Ireland, topping the paperback fiction lists for many weeks. A moving story of land, love and family, it was followed by a sequel, Across the River in 2000, which was also a bestseller. One of Ireland’s most popular authors, Alice has continued writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry since.
“Ireland’s Laurie Lee: a chronicler of fading village life who sells and sells.” –Observer
“She has become the most popular and universally loved author in memo
ry.” –Mail on Sunday
Also by Alice Taylor
Memoirs
To School Through the Fields
Quench the Lamp
The Village
The Parish
Country Days
The Night Before Christmas
The Gift of a Garden
And Time Stood Still
Do You Remember?
Poetry
The Way We Are
Close to the Earth
Going to the Well
The Journey
Fiction
The Woman of the House
Across the River
House of Memories
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2014
by Brandon, an imprint of
The O’Brien Press Ltd,
12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar,
Dublin 6, Ireland.
Tel: +353 1 4923333;
Fax: +353 1 4922777
E-mail: books@obrien.ie.
Website: www.obrien.ie
First published 1994 by Brandon.
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–764–3
Text © Alice Taylor 1994
The author has asserted her moral rights.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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