The Christmas: It’s not just “Christmas” in Ireland. It’s “the” Christmas. And we don’t “spend” it, as people in other countries do: the aim here is to “get over” it. This needn’t imply any lack of enthusiasm in practice. You can be a mad-jumper-wearing party animal, doing the 12 Pubs of Christmas every night for the entire month of December. But convention demands that when discussing it afterwards – Q: “How’d ye get over the Christmas?” A: “It wasn’t too bad” – you must make it sound like it was a dose of the flu, now more or less cleared up.
Stephenses Day
December 26th in Ireland is still
St Stephen's Day, even to atheists. But the "St" is usually dropped in conversation and, according to tradition, an extra syllable added at the end of "Stephen's", for no reason. The habit has even been immortalised in a piece of choral music, On Stephenses Day, by the 20th-century composer Elizabeth Maconchy, who was in fact English, but had Irish relatives and must have inhaled deeply when visiting them. Thanks to her, even choirs in England occasionally have to say "Stephenses".
Not-quite-midnight Mass
“Like a bird on the wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free,” sang Leonard Cohen, who wasn’t talking about the tradition of Irish Christmas Eve Masses but could have been. The attendance at such ceremonies by worshippers fresh from pub closing, who were often a little too enthusiastic in their contributions to the choral singing and responsorial psalms, may be one of the reasons that actual midnight Masses are unusual now. The standard these days tends to be no later than 10pm – times when most Irish church-goers are still reserved enough to leave the singing to the angels.
Black and white
This 60 seconds of nostalgia is brought to you by Guinness. Snow is general, all over Ireland. It's falling on the Custom House in Dublin: on a man and his dog; on a children's snowball fight in Cork; on a fox; on a horse peering out over a stable door; on Belfast City Hall; on mad house lights somewhere; on a boat in Galway; on a pub in darkest Meath; and, back in Dublin, on the heaving brass bosom of Molly Malone. The classic Guinness ad unites the four provinces under a wam blanket of nostalgia, with strings and a muted horn section playing the soundtrack of your long-lost childhood (although apparently it's an original piece by the composer Kevin Sargent).
Boxing day
It needn’t come to fisticuffs, exactly, but no Irish Yuletide is complete without a family row, as simmering resentments are brought to the boil by periods of enforced proximity. In common with the turkey, a good row can be reheated for several days afterwards. The bones can then be picked well into January. After that you can make soup out of them.
A portrait of the parents
Ideally, the row should happen during Christmas dinner, as in a classic scene from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There, the recent death of Parnell is the catalyst for a bitter argument between the extended Joyce families’ pro- and
anti-clerical factions, with a casual reference to the posterior extremity of a turkey (“the Pope’s nose”) among the escalating factors. According to one of Joyce’s biographers, the real-life argument was loud enough to be heard by neighbours across the street in Bray, where the family then lived. And, like the best Irish rows, it ended in tears (from the men of the house on this occasion), recrimination (the women) and literature. Unbeknown to the participants, the whole thing was being witnessed by the wide-eyed future father of the modern novel, then aged nine.
Musical misery lit
The Irish Yuletide family row is also the subplot of what is by common consent the greatest Christmas song ever. The Pogues' 1987 epic Fairytale of New York also touches on other classic Irish themes – drinking, emigration, the certainty that everything will go wrong eventually, etc – and elevates them into a thing of beauty with the help of the late Kirsty MacColl and the famous New York Police Department choir. There's no such thing as the NYPD Choir; it only has a pipe band. But it's Christmas, so we're allowed to pretend. The song was made all the more festive by its original video, complete with a cameo appearance from Matt Dillon and some amateur dramatics by Shane MacGowan and MacColl, whose performances, if they were any hammier, would have had to be served with apple sauce.
A little bit of poetry
Along with peace and goodwill, Christmas is a time for reading poems. Or so this newspaper thinks, anyway. By a tradition stretching back into the mists of the last century, The Irish Times always puts a piece of verse on the front page of its Christmas Eve print edition. For many readers this may be the year's only close encounter with poetry. But if it gets you in the mood for something stronger, look no farther than the Patrick Kavanagh classic A Christmas Childhood, which relocates the Nativity to a night-time farmyard in Inniskeen, viz: "My father played the melodeon / My mother milked the cows, / And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned / On the Virgin Mary's blouse."
For the birds
The origins of the annual Irish Christmas wren hunt are obscure. But in religious tradition, at least, the excuse is the diminutive bird's alleged role as state informer in the case of Roman Judea versus St Stephen. A wren is said to have betrayed the latter's hiding place to his pursuers, condemning him to a martyr's death. The resultant annual revenge hunt by Christians is the motif for Sigerson Clifford's famous song The Boys of Barr na Sráide. Set in Cahirciveen, this traces the lives of a group of early-20th-century Kerrymen through the usual rites of passage: the fight against the Black and Tans, exile and death. But above all it celebrates their fearlessness in the terrorising of a tiny defenceless bird that has been framed for a crime it almost certainly didn't commit.
Celebrity busking
It usually starts with Glen Hansard and a few friends singing songs at the top of Grafton Street, in Dublin, to raise money for Simon, the homelessness charity. But sooner or later Bono is spirited in from somewhere, like the baby Jesus being added to a crib. At this point the crowds multiply. Young American tourists say, "Wow – it's Bono," then lose themselves in the crazy Irish spontaneity of the moment by taking phone videos of it to watch when they get back home. Eventually, somebody at the front passes a collection hat into the crowd, in full confidence that it will come back again – which, amazingly, it does. Soon after that Bono is spirited away to safety, before King Herod gets word of his whereabouts.
Swimming and running
For growing numbers of Irish people, engaging in some form of extreme physical activity has become a traditional prelude to the Christmas dinner. The hardier eccentrics go swimming first thing in the morning, at the Forty Foot, in Dublin, or in local lakes. If it’s necessary to break ice before entering the water, that only adds to the fun. The running of Goal Miles, at venues throughout Ireland, is a soft option by comparison. But for true Yuletide masochism it’s hard to beat an annual handicap race run by Donore Harriers athletic club, in Dublin, and dating back to the 1890s. It’s 10 miles cross-country, often in conditions stickier than sticky toffee pudding. And it happens on the morning of December 26th, so competitors are handicapped by Christmas dinner as well as whatever time officials think should be added to give everyone an equal chance. It seems to work. Past winners have included Eamonn Coghlan, a world beater at the time, and a 75-year-old man who’d been competing without success for half a century.
Liver and lights
Cork has several Christmas culinary traditions all its own, some of which – notably spiced beef – have been exported to Dublin and even farther afield by emigrants. They also include drisheen, a kind of sausage made from sheep’s blood and milk. The latter enjoyed a public-relations triumph recently, when it featured in a glowing review of a Cork restaurant by the influential British food critic AA Gill. Unfortunately, he misnamed it as dasheen. But even this may have worked to the product’s benefit. I’ll be surprised if some enterprising Corkonians have not already exported it to London gourmet shops as a seasonal special: Dasheen-through-the-Snow.
The spirit of Christmas
Even in these weight-conscious times no traditional Christmas is complete without plum pudding. And no pudding is complete until it has been set on fire. The classic incendiary material is whiskey, Irish preferably, or brandy, although getting these to make a convincing blaze on a pudding is not as easy as it sounds. A few years ago, in a controversy second only to her marriage break-up, Nigella Lawson suggested using vodka instead. But really, if you have no respect for tradition, you might as well use petrol.
Taking the biscuit
First made in 1918, and named after the country whose troops were all the rage in Europe at the time, USA assorted biscuits – in the classic tin – were a rite of passage for generations of Irish people, and often a lesson in deferred gratification. They comprised 14 varieties, half of them involving chocolate, with two tiers in every tin. The nonchocolate ones included pink wafers: always popular. But they also included some of the most boring biscuits ever created. In properly regulated families it was the rule that you had to finish all the top tier before you could break though to the one below and hit the chocolates again. Looking back, it was a useful preparation for austerity.
Women’s Christmas
Christmas officially ends on January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, also known in Ireland as Nollag na mBan, or Women’s Christmas. The latter name arises because, by some now distant tradition, it was the day women could put their feet up and be waited on by the men of the house. But, as most Irish women will tell you, it really would be an epiphany if this ever happened in reality. In James Joyce’s classic short story The Dead, which is set on this date, women remain as central to the catering operation as ever. But they do at least get to deliver the story’s climactic epiphany, when the main female character reveals the role in her life of a dead former lover who meant more to her than her current husband ever will. Have that with your brandy and cigars, why don’t you.
