The Night Before Christmas Read online

  The Night

  Before Christmas

  Alice Taylor

  To Sean for my stone steps

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Christmas Past

  Goosey Goosey Gander

  Getting the Holidays

  The Christmas Chimney

  Letter to Santy

  Holly Sunday

  Nell’s Clean Sweep

  In From the Fields

  Cleaning Up

  Bringing the Christmas

  The Gates of Heaven

  Christmas Eve

  Our Christmas Visitor

  Christmas Cards

  The Night Before Christmas

  Christmas

  Hunting the Wren

  Days of Rest

  About the Author

  Also by Alice Taylor

  Copyright

  Christmas Past

  NED LIFTED THE LATCH on the door into Christmas when the muscatel raisins appeared on his counter. They were big, soft and juicy and arrived with the ordinary raisins, sultanas and currants in mid-November. Ned weighed them all into stiff brown paper bags and tied them with cord that he kept on the counter in a tin box. The cord snaked its way out through a hole at the top of the can and Ned had the knack of winding it around his fingers and cracking it effortlessly.

  He calculated exactly how many pounds of fruit he would sell as his customers’ ways and practices were well known to him. He knew that Mrs Casey made three cakes, one for her sister in England, another for her own family and a third one that “himself ” would have eaten before the festive season was quite upon her. Then there was Martin’s mother who had sisters married all over the parish and made a cake for each one of them. Martin, who worked with us, was loud in praise of his mother’s baking. She needed a good supply and Ned was not going to see her short. Then there was old Nell who lived alone beside us and wanted everything halved down into little bags; she did not bother to make a cake at all but ate the fruit straight out of the bag by the fire at night, and sometimes I helped her. Ned worked out all his customers’ Christmas needs and because fruit was scarce he stored it away into cardboard boxes, and the candied peel was weighed and put into the boxes as well.

  When they came to buy their cards, he went through the selection with them. He had red robins for Mrs Casey, who liked her cards to be full of festive cheer, and other ones with long verses for my mother, because she was very particular about the verses in her cards. He consulted and deliberated with them and sometimes consoled them about the loss of a relative in foreign parts who that year no longer had an earthly address.

  Every customer got a present. It was a token of appreciation of their patronage throughout the year. Big round barm bracks and seed loaves were all sorted out and allocated to the different homes. He even gave presents to people who owed him money, because those were the days of little red notebooks and people did not always pay on the dot. But Ned was kind-hearted and maybe their grandmother had been a customer in her day; perhaps this generation was not as good to manage, so they needed a bit of help; another family might be going through a bad patch, and anyway Christmas was no time to be thinking of thrifty details.

  Of all the Christmas supplies the candles were the last to arrive: big two-pound red and white candles, and he always remembered which customer went for the white and which favoured the red. My mother was a white-candle woman and Mrs Casey favoured the red ones. Every house took three candles: one for Christmas Eve, one for New Year’s Eve and one for Little Christmas Eve; but Nell took one for the three nights and sometimes produced it the following year again. Boxes of messages left the shop with the big candles standing in the middle like shepherds’ staffs heralding the coming of Christmas.

  Though the smell of Ned’s shop on that Sunday morning when the muscatel raisins appeared rang the first bell of Christmas in our minds, there were other signs at home around the farm where the whole work pattern was winding down for the season of rest. On the ditches around the fields, the trees were bare and had gone to sleep for the winter. The fields themselves were in turn wet and squelching with rain or hard and barren with frost and snow and they no longer offered sustenance to the animals, who abandoned them for the comfort of the farmyard. We, too, withdrew from the cold world outside and spent our time in the hay-barn playing imaginary games, or around the fire in the kitchen listening to our old friend Bill telling stories, or sometimes being visited by Nell if she wanted something.

  My father’s work for the year was done, so he had more time to sit by the fire and smoke his pipe, and the game that he sometimes played with us then was “Cat-out-of-that”, though he ran it off as “Catouthat.” It was a very simple game but it was great fun. You put your hand on his knee, which was crossed over his other leg. Then he rubbed your hand gently, saying “poor pussy” and laid his hand on yours. Then it was your turn to go “poor pussy” on top of his hand with your other hand, and then he came again with his second hand and this interchanging of hands continued and you were lulled into a sense of soothed relaxation. I loved the warm, firm feel of my father’s hands, which were well-formed with long, tapering fingers. Then suddenly his hand came down hard and fast on yours and he declared “Catouthat!” The trick was to anticipate the “catouthat” and whip your hand away in time before he landed; then you were the one doing “poor pussy”. In our family that game was never forgotten and if in later years somebody was pussyfooting around when more decisive action was required, the comment was passed that it was time for “Catouthat”.

  It was my mother who calmed things down when the excitement of Christmas got us all worked up, and she poured oil on troubled waters if any of us children had a row, but she never took sides, always telling us that it took two to make a fight. With five sisters close on each other’s heels, there was sometimes a free-for-all. But these conflicts never lasted long, and Dan — who always came for Christmas — advised my mother when a row was in progress and rejected appeals that she should act as adjudicator.

  “Keep out of it, Missus,” he would say; “it’s only a fool would come between them.”

  My brother Tim, who was the eldest, never got caught up in his sisters’ arguments and in many ways was like my mother, who believed in peace and quiet. Frances, who was small and dark and just into her teens, was the sister in charge and she organised the rest of us to do the jobs around the kitchen and farmyard. She did it by means of coaxing and blackmail and was very good at labour relations, using the inducement of a long story at bedtime as an enticement to get through undesirable jobs. Teamed with Frances on the board of management was Terry, who was slim and fast-thinking and who would have ten jobs done while I would be looking at them. They were the pair at the top of the family ladder and Phil and I were at bottom with Eileen, who was tall and green-eyed, in between. Phil was quiet, dark and thoughtful, with long thick hair flowing down over her shoulders or coiled around her head. I was the direct opposite to her as I was long-legged, thin and cheeky.

  We loved Christmas and threw ourselves whole-heartedly into all the preparations which my mother left in our hands, and maybe we enjoyed Christmas all the better when we had put such effort into all the work leading up to it.

  Our diet at the time consisted of home-produced milk, free-range eggs, bacon and home-grown vegetables: wholesome fare but repetitive, and so the thought of the variety that Christmas would bring filled us with great anticipation. Lemonade, sweet cake and chocolates in our home at that time were like manna in the desert.

  The changes that Christmas brought made it stand out in our lives like roses in snow. As well as that, the thought of Santa actually coming across the s
ky to our home filled us with delight, and it was the only occasion when toys or games came into our house. It was a time of great expectations which climaxed with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then the Wren Day brought a burst of colour and music into the quiet countryside. Between Christmas and Little Christmas and for a time afterwards, we wound down slowly in what was the rest period of the farming year. The farm workers took their holidays until the first of February, so they were free then to call on the neighbours and many house-dances were held. But the biggest dance of all was the Oregonman’s ball, when all those home from America came together to celebrate their return and to meet the neighbours. It was a time when old friends met and everybody home for Christmas called around to all the houses in the locality. So Christmas was in many different ways the highlight of our year.

  The plucking of the geese about eight days before Christmas Day was the first step. Then for the twelve days of Christmas itself we withdrew into the house like squirrels as the work of the farm was put on hold.

  So this is the story of work and celebration: the story of a Christmas past that glowed like a warm fire in the middle of a long, cold winter, when the snow covered the ground for many weeks and I was nine years old.

  Goosey Goosey Gander

  THEY WERE A STRANGE COUPLE. He was long-legged and his thin, scrawny neck was thrust forward in a continuous genuflecting movement. Sometimes his head tilted so far in advance that it seemed he might lose his balance and fall forward, but his head always came up in the nick of time and brought him upright again. She was soft and voluptuous, her large white bosom quivering out ahead of her. But there was no question of her losing her balance, for her broad, generous bottom wobbled along behind holding the balance of power.

  Every morning they led the other geese down the hilly field at the front of the house on their way to the river. He strode slightly ahead of her, not out of any sense of superiority or lack of courtesy, but simply checking the way forward to make sure that the path was smooth for her, whose richly endowed body barely moved clear of the ground. He was a caring custodian whose restrained protective behaviour cushioned her from the rough patches of their life together.

  The only occasion on which he threw caution to the winds was in the mating season when, overcome by a flurry of strong sexual urges, he demanded his copulation rights with excited cries and a flapping of wings. She granted his wishes with queenly tolerance. But when she decided that she had satisfied his needs she rose and tossed him to the ground with a disdainful gesture. It was the only time that she was totally in control and the gander lost his male composure. He looked as if the occasion had unbalanced him, because instead of his head dipping forward in its usual manner it then went from side to side as if he was caught in a cross-wind. But the goose stood there emitting soothing quacks. She seemed to be telling him: “You’ll be all right in a few minutes. Just pull yourself together now, old boy.” And the gander did just that. The experience had knocked him sideways, but gradually his head returned to its genuflecting motion and his feathers smoothed down. When he deemed himself to be back in control, he proceeded forward and led his partner in passion down the hilly field to the river, the lesser members of his harem following behind. There he cooled his abating ardour in the soothing waters beneath the trees.

  On that bright spring morning, though culinary niceties were not high on his list of priorities, our gander had taken the first step towards providing us with roast goose for our Christmas dinner.

  Some weeks later the mother goose herself took the next step when, prompted by natural instinct, she made her nest in a shady corner under the sloping galvanised iron roof of the old stone goose-house. She gathered together bits of hay which she darned into a round, cosy shape with soft down and feathers eased from her ample folds. Then she hunkered in and tested it for size and comfort, but it was not to her satisfaction, so out she waddled again and began a remake. It took her a long time to weave the nest perfectly and during all that time the gander stood on one leg, looking on and nodding his head in approval.

  Once she was happy with the state of affairs she sat herself down and laid her first large white egg. It was so enormous compared to the hen eggs that I was fascinated by the size of it. Soon afterwards the other geese followed her example, and as the eggs increased in number my mother stored them in a large dish in the room below the kitchen. They were too large for normal human consumption, though we had one neighbour, an enormous man, who liked one for his breakfast. When the goose had reached her laying quota the hatching instinct took over and she refurbished her brood chamber to a higher level of comfort and was transferred to a safer house. My mother placed the eggs back in the nest, and the goose fluffed herself down on top of them. It was a source of surprise to me that she succeeded in easing her large webbed feet in between the eggs without damaging them. She was soon joined in the hatching chamber by her sister geese and they sat on the eggs for a month, leaving them only to eat and drink, and all the time the faithful gander stood in attendance. Not only was he going to be present at the birth but he supervised every step of the hatching period with paternal care.

  The day the first gosling tapped his tentative head through the soft embryonic curtain behind the crumbling white shell was a day of great excitement, and as the remaining eggs cracked open, the nests turned from a pool of milk-white shells into a sea of butter-yellow goslings. My mother assisted in the removal of the discarded shells, a feat which required perfect timing and cool courage because the parties involved did not welcome gynecological intervention and could quite readily bite the helping hand. On the morning when the proud mothers paraded their bright-yellow little ones out of their house the gander danced with joy and led them down to the water. He was a wonderful father, prepared to take on any threat to his family, whom he protected with outstretched flapping wings and hissing beak. When he went into attack in full battledress he was a formidable assailant and the other farm animals who might have considered a soft gosling a dainty dish quickly changed their minds after an encounter with the doting daddy. As his fluffy brood grew into leggy teenagers he kept them in line as well. During the long summer days they roamed the fields and came home at night to their smelly goose-house. They seemed to have no objection to the pungent conditions, because when my father cleaned it out and gave them fresh bedding, they quickly reduced it to its former state.

  They passed an idyllic summer grazing the fields and swimming in the river. The only thing to challenge their carefree existence was the wily fox who roamed around the farmyard at night looking for unlocked doors, and every night we had to ensure that their house was made secure against him. Perhaps the high point of their year came on the evening of the threshing when, once the thresher had pulled out of the haggard, they descended on the spilt grain and the mounds of chaff with screeching anticipation and began a glorious feast which lasted for a few days, during which time they kept up a continual chorus of cackling appreciation. Then they went out on to the stubble fields where the grain had come from and here they continued a meticulous search for the last of the left-overs.

  Come November the goslings were long-legged, fit young geese which my mother called grass geese, but they were in no condition to provide the wherewithal for a succulent Christmas dinner, a situation that had to be remedied. It was time, my mother declared, to fatten them up. They were put into the goose-house where they gobbled up buckets of sloppy mash; they grew fat and inactive and loved all the attention. My brother used to look in at them, shaking his head at the unfairness of it all, and quote a few lines from a poem that he liked:

  Alas, regardless of their doom,

  The little victims play;

  No fears have they of ills to come

  Or cares beyond today.

  Then one day the jennet was tackled to the crib, which was created by putting railings around the creamery cart, and it was filled with fat, screeching geese. They were now on their way to the Christmas market. But the bes
t of them, seven in all, were held back for home cooking and to provide Christmas gifts for town relatives. We would need three ourselves: one for Christmas Day, one for New Year’s Day and one for Little Christmas, or the Women’s Christmas as my father called it. The other four were for aunts and cousins. Mother goose and the gander did not seem to notice that their family was shrinking. About ten days before Christmas they were left totally childless when my mother declared that “plucking the geese” night was upon us. For a few days previously the poor geese had been starved, and as soon as we came home from school that evening we had to sit down at the kitchen table and get the lessons out of the way. This meant that we did not have the help of our old friend Bill who lived on top of the hill behind our house and who came every night to help us with our lessons, but even our loyal and trusted Bill was going to abandon ship that night. The early lessons session was my mother’s plan for clearing the decks for the marathon night of plucking; we were the only work-force available and as we were a reluctant brigade she was eliminating potential excuses.

  The duty of executioner fell upon my mother simply because no one else would be party to it. Early in their goose lives my father had declared to her that they were “your geese”, which applied especially if they got into the meadows where they flattened the uncut hay and left evidence of their lack of toilet training.

  We hated the plucking of the geese, the only redeeming feature of which was that it meant that Christmas was around the corner. The actual killing was a barbaric ritual and when the corpses emerged from the death chamber, which was the room below the kitchen on the night, each had a bloody slit across the back of its head. They were still warm and frightened the wits out of me when they gave an occasional shudder as their life blood ebbed away into a jam pot.