The Night Before Christmas Read online

  That night as we sat around the fire Minnie purred in contentment. It had been a rough day for her but now things were back to normal and she was warm again, which was all that mattered in her world. We could smell the newly disturbed soot and a film of it still rested on high, less accessible points around the kitchen. But it was not destined to stay there very long, for Ned’s had only been the first step in the Christmas cleaning. Minnie had her only rough day put down, but I knew that I had a few ahead of me when my sisters moved into action around the house in the big Christmas clean-up.

  Letter to Santy

  IVY TRAILED DOWN over the weather-beaten door, like tendrils of hair over the face of an old lady. During its lifetime this door had been pink, green, red and grey, and then all these colours had faded and peeled and blended together to give it a soft, multi-coloured, weather-beaten appearance. In the days after the plucking of the geese, it became a place of daily pilgrimage because behind it hid the spirits of Christmas coming. They hung off the rafters, their yellow legs bound with brown binder-twine. White, frozen spirits, they swung with fanned wings and downward beaks, like swooping angels in the dark shadows of the turf-house. The peeling boards of the old door had shrunk with the passage of time, so now I could peer through the gaps into the eerie gloom inside. Sometimes I reached upwards and pressed down the rusty latch and pushed the protesting door, which scraped along the stone floor. To push the door open completely required more courage than I possessed. I kept the greater portion of my body safely outside, ready for flight, in case one of these grey-white ghosts might spring to life and carry me away on its beak. So I poked my head in a small opening and peered in awe at these ashen creatures. They bore little resemblance now to the plump white geese which had quacked comfortably around the straw-filled fattening house the previous week.

  This door was my diary, reserved for recording the good things of my life. One of the rusty hinges had a loose nail which I could pull out and with this I scratched out dates when happy things happened to me and drew little scenes that held special meaning for me. Nobody else could make head nor tail of all the scribbling and scratching, but for me they had a secret meaning. The gaps between the stones around it were the hiding places for my treasures: coloured sea shells, odd-shaped stones from the river bed, bits of coloured glass and an old bird’s nest in which I would keep my letter for Santa until posting time was right.

  The night we got the school holidays was set aside for the major undertaking of writing to Santa. Up until such time as we saw the Master firmly turn the big iron key in the gaping old lock we did not feel safe from the fetters of school to concentrate completely on Christmas; now, however, it was time to let Santa know that we were expecting him to call and to advise him as to our requirements.

  Our friend Bill from the top of the hill behind our house was the man to take charge of this writing class. After supper that night when we had the ware washed, we gathered around the kitchen table. We covered the table with old copies of the Cork Examiner to level the writing surface and to absorb spilt ink. My father decided that it would be a good night to visit the neighbours because writing letters to Santa was not quite his field. Bill directed operations from beside the fire and my mother darned stockings in her usual position under the oil lamp. Because notepaper was a luxury reserved for foreign letters, we had to be satisfied with pages from our school copy-books. My mother placed a bottle of Quink ink in the centre of the table, at least at the point that she considered to be the centre, but that was a debatable point and an argument evolved about what point exactly was the dead centre of the table. A mini tug-of-war with the ink bottle resulted in ink splashes on the Cork Examiner, and Bill intervened with the threat that if we did not behave ourselves he would follow in our father’s footsteps. We did not really believe him but at the same time were afraid to take the chance. Without Bill, the layout plan and the final decisions on requests and spelling might prove a problem. The final choice of ink-well position was left to him. When he placed it back in the exact spot that my mother had chosen, we all had to be satisfied, but the least satisfied compensated for their disappointment by making faces at those who grinned in victory. In front of each of us was a school copy and the lucky ones had an unused centre page which could be eased out gently from beneath the tin grips.

  We were very inexperienced in the art of letter-writing so Bill started us all off with our address at the top right-hand corner. My sister Phil, who loved geography, was not satisfied with the bare address, however, and added Ireland, Europe, and This World. I doubted that Santa needed all those directions, but because she was better at geography than me, I decided to follow suit. The next step was how to address him: Father Christmas, Santa or Santy. We always called him Santy, but then we sometimes called one of the teachers in school Nellie but we would not dare call her that to her face. Was Santy childish and overfamiliar? We split on that decision but I stuck to Santy because in my mind I could never think of him as anything other than Santy, and if I called him something else I would think that I was writing to a stranger.

  We dipped our “n” pens into the ink. If we went down too deep in the bottle we emerged with a surplus, which resulted in a blob on the copybook. Sometimes this could be partly absorbed with blotting paper, especially if the blotting paper was white and clean. If the blotting paper did not quite succeed, an ink rubber was brought into action, but over-use of this could result in a hole making its unwelcome appearance. Then you had to start all over again.

  It was when we came to the choice of requests that the real problem emerged. We knew exactly what we needed but at the same time we did not want to appear too greedy. This was where Bill debated and advised. I wanted a doll because I had never had one that was entirely my own and I didn’t mind how small she was as long as she was mine alone. But I also wanted crayons, a colouring book and a school sack, because my books were always falling out of the sack that I had and it had been patched and sewn up so often that the patches were now being patched. I wondered was I stretching my luck too far to be looking for three things, but Bill advised chancing it, so I listed my needs, satisfied that I had covered everything. When I had my letter written to my satisfaction and laboriously signed, I wrote out an exact copy and hid it in my pocket. My mother produced an airmail envelope, we folded all the letters up neatly and placed them inside, and then my sister Frances addressed it to “Santa, The North Pole”. The following day we were waiting for Johnny the Post when he came, and he assured us that it would be on its way that night.

  Later that day I went back to the old turf-house door and drew back the ivy. There between the stones was the dried-out bird’s nest that was no longer in use because its owner was on her foreign holidays. I eased my letter to Santa out of my pocket and tucked it into the nest. I considered this the ideal resting place because the owner and Santa both belonged to foreign places and came here across the sky. There was the mystery of the unknown about the worlds they both came from; they belonged in the sky and my letter was destined to join them there when the time was right.

  On Christmas Eve I would collect my letter from the nest, and as we sat around the fire that night, I would drop it into the blazing sods of turf where it would curl up and join the smoke going up the chimney. My letter to Santa would be recorded in the smoke that went straight up Black Ned’s clean chimney and Santa would read my message in the clouds.

  Holly Sunday

  AFTER MASS WE SET out for the wood. Even though our house was surrounded by trees, we had no holly tree and going for the Christmas holly meant a major excursion. It was a cold, wet day, but the weather provided no barrier to our enthusiasm. We dressed ourselves up in what we called our “everyday coats”, leaving our Sunday wear hanging in the wardrobe.

  We went into the barn where my father usually kept bits of left-over hay-twine which he wound up into little coils and tucked in under the rafters. They were stored high above the block of hay, so we had to climb up the l
ong timber ladder and walk over the spongy hay that bounced up and down under our weight. We found the hidden twine between the swallows’ nests, which were hidden behind the barn poles under the rafters, waiting for their summer residents to return from far-away places. Our pockets bulging with hay-twine, we went in pursuit of the next necessity for the success of our undertaking, a saw. This presented a bit of a hurdle to be overcome as my father had a long memory about top-class saws that had gone to the wood and had never again seen the light of day. The easiest approach seemed to be just to take one on the quiet, but he was a step ahead of us and had ensured that there was not a saw in sight. We tried to convince him that his saw would be so safe with us that he would have nothing to worry about, but we finished up with a rusty antique in need of false teeth which, if it had been lost, would not have been missed.

  Eventually we set out across the fields, not on the well-worn pathway that was beaten down by our journey to school, but in the opposite direction across strange fields where the ditches were well shrouded in briars, bushes and blackthorn hedges. Some were practically impenetrable with their density of foliage, but even so they were no match for our determination to make a breakthrough. The blackthorn put up the sternest resistance and dug its vicious spikes into our bulky clothes; though we finally broke free the blackthorn wore strips of our coats in victory. We knew nothing about going into reverse to free ourselves from the fetters of briars and branches; in our single mindedness we thought only of going forward. The barbed wire, however, we treated with greater respect: we held it up for each other as we crawled under it on our hands and knees, curving our backs to avoid the barbs. Where it was low we held it down and swung our legs over it, taking care to avoid quivering spikes making contact with long-legged knickers. Sometimes when this happened we struggled free only to find that the tails of our coats had made contact with another spike.

  Although the ditches were barriers to be overcome, they were as nothing compared to the river that lay ahead. Normally we crossed this river at a shallow point where it was bridged by large stepping-stones. I usually jumped gingerly from stone to stone, my heart thumping in fright, but I always reached the other bank in a flush of triumph as I jumped from the last stone to land safely on solid ground. But when the river was in flood the stepping-stones disappeared beneath a swirl of foaming brown water.

  That day, because it had rained heavily earlier in the week, the stepping-stones were nowhere to be seen and the river gushed along in an angry torrent. But we had the measure of this river and knew its weakness. At one point it was narrow and when the stepping-stones failed this narrow section provided a second, though less desirable option. Here you could jump across and if you paced yourself well and luck was on your side you could make it dry to the other side. The best jumper went first: we all watched with bated breath as he sailed across and sighed in relief when he landed safely. As the expertise of the jumpers decreased so did the clearing distance at the other side. When my turn came there was no clearing distance at all as I landed in the wet gravel at the edge of the water and had to be hauled out with mud and water oozing out of my high laced-up boots. Once we were all across we cheered in victory and proceeded on our way.

  We were glad to reach the wood and shelter from the rain. Inside it was dark and eerie and the trees sighed and dripped on the soft carpet of pine needles and brown and faded leaves that clung to our wet leather boots. No birds sang and it was as if the wood had gone to sleep; we found ourselves whispering until someone asked out loud: “What are we whispering for?” The question broke the sombre silence and we started to shout in order to prove to ourselves that we were not overawed by the dark, cathedral stillness of the wood. We ran around under the trees, hiding behind their trunks and jumping out to frighten each other, and the braver ones forged ahead out of sight where they climbed up into the high branches and swung down like Tarzan letting out bloodcurdling yells. I searched along the path, on the look-out for my special tree that I visited every year. It had a soft mossy trunk with big lumps and hollows and it was easy to imagine that little people lived inside it. At first I could not find it and began to think that it had disappeared when suddenly there it was in front of me, mossier and softer than ever. I ran and put my arms around it but the span was much wider than the length of my arms. Its lowest branches seemed miles above my head, but its trunk was so full of interesting little corners that the temptation to stay and play in them was very strong. Every Christmas I promised myself to make a summer trip but forgot all about it until Holly Sunday again.

  Our mission was to gather holly, so eventually we laid our hay-twine along the soft, pine-covered ground in the corner where the holly trees hid amongst taller neighbours. We divided our team into climbers, catchers and wrappers. The climbers had to cut or break off the pieces of holly which in their opinion looked the best, though their judgement was sometimes assisted by their ground crew. My father’s saw squeaked and scraped across the branches and proved as useless as we had feared, so the branches were severed by a combination of jolted sawing, cracking and twisting. The catcher was lucky if the branch fell clearly to the ground; sometimes it had to be burrowed out from between other branches while the climber from above shouted instructions and bent the tree in the right direction. The ground crew sorted the collection into different lengths and laid them across the hay-twine. The cream of the crop bore red berries, and as long as we had enough red-berried holly for the Christmas candle and crib we were happy. We had to be careful when tying up the bundles with the hay-twine as the holly did not take too kindly to being tied tightly and scratched and scraped in retaliation.

  The next item on the agenda was ivy, and the collection of this was done from the ground. We caught the tail end of long strips of ivy that were growing up along the big trees. Sometimes we were lucky and it ran with us, but sometimes just when we thought we had a fine length it cracked and we were left holding bare stringy bits while looking upwards at fine leafy foliage away above our heads. The ivy was much softer and easier to handle than the holly, and when we had sufficient we wound it up into large hoops and tied them together. Then all that remained for collection was the moss for the crib and the base of the Christmas tree. Some of the banks along by the paths had nice moss but the best bits grew up along the trunks of the old trees. If a tree was tilted forward the moss seemed to form a coat along the leaning trunk almost like a saddle on a horse’s back and if you got your fingers neatly in under it you could lift the large layer off in one go. When this operation commenced I always tried to lead the moss gatherers away from my special tree, but someone was bound to discover it. Then only tears and hysterics on my part kept his coat on against the winter cold. My brother lectured me about the need, for the good of the tree, that it should be relieved of its mossy coat, but I was not impressed by his argument. All I knew was that without my coat I felt the cold and I could not see how it was any different for my special tree. Lectures on natural conservation cut no ground with me. Finally my tears won the day and my friend was safe for another year.

  With the return of the crows to the wood for the night, we knew that it was time to go home. They arrived with a flurry of black wings across the sky and swooped down with a clatter of squawking that turned the wood into an echo of demented noise. We came out from under the trees to find that the rain had stopped and the freezing early night air hit us across the face like a cold cloth. Jack Frost was busy laying his grey shroud across the countryside. The dripping trees of the early afternoon had been turned into frozen, silent shapes and the grass crunched beneath our boots.

  Burdened with the greenery, our progress was slow and the bundles had to be shifted regularly as the thorny holly made a prickly travelling companion. When we arrived back at the river it was necessary to get the bundles safely across before we took the jump ourselves. They had to be thrown over with a good sense of direction because a miscalculation could result in a bundle disappearing down the river. Everything wen
t according to plan, and as I waited to take my running jump, the cold bit my face and numbed my fingers; my toes in my wet boots felt as if they were outside rather than inside my thick knitted stockings. It was luck rather any athletic skill that got me safely back across the river. As we trudged homewards the moon rose higher in a navy-blue sky and when we stood to look up at the stars I wondered which one of them had come down to light up the crib on that first Christmas night.

  When we arrived home we took our holly to the old stone house at the end of the yard where my mother’s plucked geese were hanging off the rafters. Here we sorted out our collection into different lots, because tomorrow we would take a bundle each to my grandmother and to Nell and Bill who had no children to go to the wood to collect holly for them.

  Nell’s Clean Sweep

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING I set out for Nell’s house with her Christmas holly bundle on my back. As I left the yard my father called after me: “Will you tell that wan to get Black Ned to clean her chimney while he is around or she’ll be burnt to a cinder under that thatch of hers.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I shouted back at him, “but she won’t do it anyway.”

  “No,” he agreed, “she’ll wait until she’s in a blaze and then expect foola here to put it out with a big spit.”

  Nell was a constant source of irritation to my father and he often compared her to her own donkey. He declared that you could neither lead nor drive the pair of them. I had a limited amount of sympathy for his point of view but most of my sympathy was reserved for Nell. She did only what she deemed to be absolutely necessary in the way of household maintenance. The way Nell explained it to me it made great sense. Black Ned would have to be paid, and though he charged very little still Nell did not want to pay up. As well as that, she hated having anybody in around her house. She liked to have the place to herself and I liked it that way as well. I could disappear across the fields to her house and be my own boss there because Nell did not conform to any rules and did not expect me to do so either.