An Irish Christmas E-Book

Stephen Newman

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 162

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This book is a compendium of material, in English and Irish, on the festival of Christmas from the manuscripts of the National Folklore Collection recalling how Christmas was celebrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in all its regional diversity. The book begins with accounts of the Christmas preparations, before moving through Christmas Eve, with its fasting, feasting and a multitude of superstitions, Christmas Day, with its focus on the home and family, and on to the accounts of the communal celebration of St Stephen's Day with Wren Boys, games and hunting. Moving towards New Year's Day, the book recalls the optimism and fear associated with a transitional time when omens for the coming year were keenly observed, and finally concludes with accounts of the Little Christmas, also known as the Women's Christmas, celebrated on 6 January, and at which point the twelve-day festival comes to a close.

Leseprobe

In memory of my mother, Joan Newman

First published in 2016

The History Press Ireland

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Ireland

www.thehistorypress.ie

The History Press Ireland are a member of Publishing Ireland, the Irish Book Publisher’s Association.

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

© Stephen Newman, 2016

Illustrations © Myra O’Reilly, 2016

The right of Stephen Newman, to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8148 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

One

Preparation and Decoration

Two

Christmas Eve

Three

Christmas Day

Four

St Stephen’s Day and the Day of the Holy Innocents

Five

The New Year and Epiphany

Notes

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The importance of the material contained within the archives of the National Folklore Collection is immense. It is a window into so many aspects of Ireland’s cultural history. One aspect of modern Irish consciousness which is highlighted by engagement with the archive is our cultural amnesia. We are disconnected through loss from the customs and beliefs of previous generations. Cultural amnesia is due to various factors, many of which began to gain momentum from the middle part of the nineteenth century. Language shift and other cultural forces associated with colonialism contributed greatly to this amnesia. Other agents of change include the centralization of the Church, which led to the displacement of traditional beliefs, generational changes in the socio-economic standards of families and communities, as well as the multi-faceted forces of globalisation, largely associated with the twentieth century. At the core of the work of what was originally founded as the Folklore of Ireland Society in 1927 (the government established the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935)1 was the preservation of material from a generation deemed to be one of the last with close links to what was understood as traditional society.

The material on Christmas is extensive and appears in two forms. Firstly, the general accounts of Irish rural life which were collected from the mid-1920s from informants in their sixties and older contain references to Christmas traditions. When reading the accounts by these particular informants, the reader can enjoy a sense of immediacy, as the direct transcription preserves their regional dialect and personal speaking styles. In addition, a large amount of material on Christmas can be found in a standardised questionnaire which was distributed to both full-time and part-time collectors in December 1944. In some cases the questionnaire was completed from interviews with individual informants, while in other cases the collectors conducted multiple interviews which they later summarised.

In December 1944, the Honorary Director of the Commission, Séamus Ó Duilearga, issued a letter to the Commission’s collectors and contributors. The following is an extract:

This is the first time that a concerted effort is being made in Ireland to gather the traditional lore of Christmas. A great amount of valuable information is still available in every corner of the land on this important festival. The questionnaires about other festivals such as Martinmas, Samhain (Halloween), St. John’s Day, Lughnasa, were productive of a vast body of material, of which we are very proud. We rely upon you to do what lies in your power to make this questionnaire even more successful than any other issued by us hitherto. We should be grateful if, in making enquiries about the subject-matter of this questionnaire, you concentrated especially on the old traditional manner of celebrating Christmas rather than on the more recent innovations (such as Santa Claus, Christmas cards, mistletoe). We shall be grateful, however, for a note regarding the introduction of these in recent decades too. (NFC 1085: 1, letter from Séamus Ó Duilearga, December 1944.)

Interestingly, what Ó Duilearga calls ‘the more recent innovations’ of Christmas such as the tree, cards and Santa Claus, are described by informants as coming to the fore within the previous forty to sixty years, and the changes can be tracked moving from the east coast to the west.

In this book the material consulted was collected between 1928-1955. In extracting material from the collection I have attempted to show examples of regional diversity in the traditional celebration of Christmas, as well as including material in the Irish language (with translations). This does not, however, imply that the accounts here are in any way exhaustive. It is certain that many localised variations and nuances do not appear. Also, it is not within the parameters of this publication to adequately examine the often far-reaching and ancient origins of the many customs and beliefs; in many cases this may not even be possible. Of course, the collection itself has its own intrinsic limitations, which have inevitably excluded various groups on the island of Ireland. The work of the Commission was ideologically bound up with the State-building and cultural revival of the post-independence period, with its focus being on a particular view, or understanding, of what was meant by Irishness. This directed it, for the most part, towards a rural, Catholic population, within Irish-speaking areas and areas that had been Irish-speaking up to relatively recently. The large urban areas were largely ignored as well as other religious groupings on the island such as Protestants and Presbyterians.

In traditional Irish society the festival of Christmas was seen as the biggest and greatest festival of the year. People began to look forward to Christmas from the period of Advent (beginning on the fourth Sunday before Christmas). It was a time of spiritual preparation; a reflective period during which attention was directed towards the coming of the Christ Child as a saviour, liberator and redeemer. Seán Ó Duinn writes: ‘The various texts which we hear in church during Advent express a longing for a saviour and an enlightener, for somebody who will rescue us from our predicament and who will give direction to our lives.’1 This anticipation of a saviour is expressed in the following account of a traditional prayer said throughout Advent:

The one special prayer I know of for Christmas was one that started on the first night of the month [1 December] and continued right up ’till Christmas Night. ’Twas said fifteen times nightly by everyone to themselves and ’twas always said after rosary. This is it: ‘Hail and blessed be the hour and moment when the Son of God was born in a stable at Bethlehem at midnight, to the most pure Virgin Mary. At that same hour and moment, promise my God to hear my prayer and grant my request.’ A lot of the older people had long black laces or bits of strong cord with fifteen knots on it, and they used to use it to say the prayer, the same as we count out the rosary on our beads. (NFC 1391: 133; Tadhg Kelly, Kilrush, County Clare. Collector: Seán McGrath, January 1955.)

Liam Danaher, from Athea, County Limerick, wrote of the importance of saying as many Paters and Aves2 as possible in the run up to Christmas:

It was an old custom for some time before Christmas to say as many Paters and Aves as possible. The younger folk were urged to keep a record of the daily number of these prayers said, and some could boast of 5,000 prayers. (NFC 1084: 97; written by Liam Danaher, Athea, County Limerick, 1945.)

By December work on the farm would have declined, with the feeding of animals, now in sheds, being the main task. In 1936 the Commission received a long account of life on a farm from Seán de Buitléir, of Duncormick, County Wexford. In his accompanying letter he wrote ‘Tá sé an-deacair cuimhneamh ar gach rud a dheineann an feirmeoir i rith na bliana ach dheineas é chomh maith agus dob fhéidir liom [It’s very hard to remember everything a farmer does during the year but I’ve done as best I could]’:

December comes at last. This is the month which every boy and girl longs to see, especially the school children. On the farm there is not an extraordinary amount of work done. There is plenty of beet seen growing still in the fields. So in this month it is all pulled, and any of it that cannot be got away to the factory is banked out.3 The marigolds are finished pulling now also, and the farmer starts to pull the turnips. These are pulled in a similar manner as the marigolds, only that they are cleaned well, all the small roots and dirt being cut off. All the turnips are not pulled in this month, but they are pulled as they are wanted. The cows and young cattle are put in the house now about the first day of December, so the work starts again of feeding and minding them. There is some ploughing done and if the weather is fairly fine some winter wheat may be sown, but as a rule coming on to Christmas not much work is done. The farmer may go to a nearby wood and cut down a couple of trees and bring them home for firewood. Another thing that I forgot to mention is the cutting of faggots which takes place in the county. A man goes into a field where there are bushes growing and puts an edge on a bill-hook. Then he puts a ‘cuff’ on his left hand. This is somewhat like a glove, only it is made of leather. He has the bill-hook in his right hand and the cuff in his left. The first thing that he does is to get two long thin bushes. He catches these in each hand and twists the tops of them into a knot. Then he lays them down on the ground and starts to cut the bushes about the size of a sheaf of corn. He lays this down on the knot of the two bushes. The trick is when there is a weight on the knot it cannot open. Then he cuts another bundle of bushes and places them opposite the other bundle but the butts of both bundles are overlapping. Then he puts on two more bundles in the same manner as described. By this time he has enough cut and laid together and now he sets about tying the faggot. He catches one of the bands and twists it into a loop. Then he gets the far band and pulls it through the loop of the near one, now the far band is twisted and pulled in under the loop of the second one. It is tied in such a way that it cannot be opened. A fairly good man would out about six faggots in the day. These faggots are very handy, for there is no bother loading them. They are used for fencing old gaps. They are also used to roof old sheds that are out in the land for the purpose of sheltering cows etc. (NFC 172: 457–61; written by Seán de Buitléir, Duncormick, County Wexford, March 1936.)

As the festival grew nearer country people headed to the nearest big town to ‘bring home the Christmas’. As well as shopping for all the essential supplies, most people speak of getting a ‘Christmas box’ from some of the shopkeepers in appreciation of their loyalty over the year. The following is from Tone O’Dea of Kilrush, County Clare:

The country people always did their shopping early in the Christmas and the town’s people did too, and they used to say they used to do this simply because they would then get their Christmas boxes from the shop they had been daling4 in. But there’s nothing like them Christmas boxes now. Grocer shops always gave their customers the makings of sweet cakes, a packet of long candles, fruit and maybe a barn brack, then pubs would give a bottle of whiskey when things was cheap, and then they started dolin’5 out them coloured wines. Every house had four, five, or six dozen of porter in bottles in for callers over the holidays. (NFC 1391: 126; Tone O’Dea, Kilrush, County Clare. Collector: Seán McGrath, January 1955.)

Mrs McCarthy of Enniskean, County Cork, compares the trip to the town of Bandon before Christmas ‘long ago’ with the time of writing in 1938:

Mhuise6 faith alay7, tis aisy8 for us to do our bit of Christmas shopping. You’d get Christmas – all the Christmas you’d want for – in every little crossroad shop now. ’Tisn’t like long ‘go at all, when we’d go to town for Christmas. ’Twould be no bother for you to get a bottle of whiskey or two for a Christmas box, not to mind candles and currants and cakes – them were good times. They were good on everyone, only for the shopkeeper was doing well, he couldn’t give out all the Christmas boxes. All they can give now is a candle or two and a barnbrack, sure they haven’t it I suppose. But long ‘go too, there wasn’t a shopeen9 at every crossroads and the town shops were doing better. Them times the Saturday before Christmas you couldn’t pull your bags through any shops in Bandon. The people used be coming home at dead dark in the night, after being out all day trying to gather up their messages.10 Sure you could throw a score o’ bowls11 through the streets the Christmas time. All the little shops through the country are taking the trade away from the towns. ‘Tis to Bandon I always go for Christmas. I’ll have the turkeys out the second Saturday before it. ‘Twas always counted on to be the best day for turkeys. Only for the few turkeys faith, we couldn’t buy Christmas at all. The bit we’ll make out of the cows at this time of year won’t do much more than keep the house going for us. (NFC 462: 230; Mrs McCarthy (62), Enniskean, County Cork. Collector: Diarmuid Ó Cruadhlaoich, January 1938.)

The house, both inside and out, was thoroughly cleaned, with walls whitewashed, and the general farmyard area received a good sprucing up. Holly and ivy were the main forms of decorations, with children often sent out to the fields or the woods to collect them. It was generally believed that Christmas decorations should be up by Christmas week. Mrs McCarthy gives an account of these preparations in the lead up to Christmas:

Oh then, the dear knows. It do be running an’ racing with us to try an’ tidy up the house a bit always for Christmas. With the short days an’ all our work, there’s a ‘fahar’12 on us to try an’ rub a bit a whitewash to the walls, an’ up there around the hob. An’ the men if you pulled ’em they couldn’t spare time to sweep the chimney for us. You’d think ’twas the harvest was calling ’em outside.

But whatever, anything would do, I’d try and put some bit o’ colour on them ould13 walls.

The dresser an’ the ware will want a scrub an’ a bit o’ tidying up if we can spare time to do it, but we always have a cow or two calving about Christmas an’ they must be tended whatever anything else will do. The bit o’ butter around Christmas time is worth a bit to us, so we must care the cows anyway. The men will provide a bit of holly an’ ivy an’ put it up of a night if the fit will take ’em to do it.

It do be put up there all round the dresser, an’ around the cupboard, a ‘sprig’ or two behind the pictures on the walls, a few ‘sprigs’ here an’ there below in the room.

Mhuise, we keeps up the ould custom an’ don’t take down the holly an’ ivy till Shrove Tuesday night an put it bakin’ the pancakes.

I don’t know, alay, what’s the manin14 of it. I used to see the ould people doin’ it an’ we’re keeping up the ould custom – that’s the way with us. (NFC: 462; 228–9; Mrs McCarthy (62), Enniskean, County Cork. Collector: Diarmuid Ó Cruadhlaoich, January 1938.)

The following is a description of the preparations around the house from Mary Walshe and Batt Shea, of Kilrush, County Clare:

Always in the country the outside and inside of the house used to be whitewashed, and the flag floors scrubbed clean for the Christmas. The women did most of this work, and many a woman herself did the whitewashing. Four pence worth of lime, and a ball of blue,15 added to sour milk, gave the best whitewash of all, and it lasted too, on the walls. In the town, they used always give the windows a special cleaning for Christmas, and the kitchens of every house shone like new pins. Holly was put up either on the day before Christmas Eve itself, or if there was a Sunday near to Christmas Eve, ’twas that day they used to fix the bits of red berry holly over pictures on the mantelpiece, and around the jam-crocks into which they used to put the long Christmas candles. Red berry holly was the favourite, but you had to be sure that none of the berries fell off the holly before Christmas, as if they did, it meant that the birds would pick up the fallen berries, and it meant a death in the house before next Christmas came around. All the people around, when they used to get their bearts16 of holly used to put it in a safe place like up in the attic or in one of the bedrooms, as then it couldn’t be out in the open, and there was no chance of it getting picked. A lot of people used to bless the holly the minute they got it, with holy water, as this protected it. Some people used to mix the laurel leaves with the holly, but this was not supposed to be proper. (NFC 1391: 124–5; Mrs Mary Walshe/Batt Shea, Kilrush, County Clare. Collector: Seán McGrath, January 1955.)

The following account of the preparations comes from north-west Donegal:

Ní raibh meas ar bith ar aol na cloiche fá choinne na hócáide seo, ach rachadh achan fhear síos go dtí an trá agus bhéarfadh siad aníos lód nó ualach sligeán, agus dhófadh siad iad sin agus bhíodh an t-aol acu a ba ghile agus ab fhéidir a fháil. Nífeadh fear an tí nó fear inteacht de na buachaillí na ballaí agus nuair a bheas sin déanta acu bhéarfadh siad a ndícheall cuidiú do fhear an tí, nó do na cailíní, a ghlanfadh lorg an aoil de na dorsa agus den urlár. Dhéanfadh siad an níochán seo cúpla lá roimh Throscadh Oíche Nollag. Ansin rachadh siad go dtí na beanntáin agus na gleanntáin thart fán áit, agus bhainfeadh siad ualach mór cuilinn. Dhéanfadh siad faichill mhaith i gcónaí an cuileann a fháil a mbeadh na blátha beaga deasa dearga orthu. Bhéarfadh siad ualach maith den eidheann isteach de na beanna ar an dóigh chéanna. Chóireodh siad agus ghléasfadh siad suas an teach agus na bóithigh agus na sciobóil leis an dá chuid. Pictiúirí beannaithe, nó pictiúirí athar nó máthar, nó den teaghlach a bheadh marbh nó ar shiúil in áit ar bith, gheibheadh siad san a gcuid féin don chuileann.