ANOTHER LIFE: On our side of the hill, a wind from Siberia both smooths away the surf and whisks what's left of its rumpus out to sea. This leaves a hollow sort of silence, a spurious winter calm in which the singing of robins is magnified and multiplied and woven from hedge to hedge: where there were one or two robins, now there are clearly half a dozen, writes Michael Viney.
At this time of year I am never quite sure what mood the robins are in. They have a half-hearted autumn song, and a full-blooded spring song which is supposed to start around Christmas. After the desultory descant of November, what I'm hearing now seems definitely to include a few macho twiddly bits: warbles and trills.
Robins still keep their favoured perch on Christmas cards - last year I received six, their breasts varying in shade between scarlet and orange (it depends on the light). How many people, I wonder, suppose that the symbolism has something to do with Christian or even pagan folklore? David Lack, the ornithologist who spent half a lifetime on the robin, once did some detective work to find out how the bird gained its place in the imagery of Christmas. Nothing in Christian lore seemed to link the robin with the birth of Christ, and even pagan traditions numbered it with other red birds in myths about the bringing of fire.
The real explanation is much more recent, and linked, like so much else in the "traditions" of Christmas, to the exuberant fashions of Queen Victoria's Britain in the mid-19th century. Lack could find no mention of the robin in English Christmas festivities until the coming of the Christmas card, a little before 1860, and the arrival of commercial Christmas stationery, on which little robins were shown carrying letters in their beaks or lifting a knocker on a front door.
The point was that the English postman at this time was dressed in red - the royal colour - and often nicknamed "the robin" in country parts. Both, presumably, were welcome on the doorstep at Christmas. But the appeal of the image survived a change of uniform to become, in Lack's account, a potent reminder of seasonal charity. Just as we feed robins with our crumbs, there were "robin dinners" for London's child beggars.
When it comes to birds as symbols, therefore, the Irish Christmas tradition of "the wran" has a much more authentic origin in early, magical human relationships with nature. The nomination of the convenient wren as king of all birds, to be killed at the winter solstice and paraded door to door so that people could share in the godly virtues flowing out at its death, was common to many European peoples (read about it in James Frazer's The Golden Bough).
Our Christmas trees are also, of course, an echo of pagan tree-worship and solstice celebration, but their resurgence in these islands is credited to Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. At Christmas in 1841, they introduced a German custom to Windsor Castle by hanging lights and decorations on a spruce tree ("the new German toy", as Charles Dickens called it), thus launching a fashion that became a major industry.
For most of the next 150 years, the standard Christmas tree was the top of a Norway spruce. But around the time of Prince Albert's innovation, as it happened, the first seedlings of another conifer - the noble fir, Abies procera - were planted in Ireland. They grew strongly in the moist, mild climate, not too different from that of the tree's native forest on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains of the western US seaboard.
Pale stripes down the noble fir's needles give the tree an attractive "blue" tint. Shaped a bit like hurleys, with blunt tips, they are also soft to the touch (unlike, say, the needles of the Sitka spruce, which prick the skin like thorns). Above all, the fir tends to hang on to its needles instead of shedding them.
Our frost-free climate gives Ireland an advantage over Continental growers, so that this particular species now leads the ambitions of our Christmas tree farms in a highly competitive European market. Some 4,000 hectares of noble fir have already been planted here, often on former tillage land in the south-east, and most of the 400,000 trees we now buy are infant versions of a fir which, left alone in the mountains, would grow up to 50 metres high and bear upright cones the size of a pint mug.
Even at two metres high, however, some noble firs are more noble than others, and we are racing Denmark to clone strains of Abies procera that grow fastest, into the shapeliest trees, with the most branches in the top whorls and with the fewest disfiguring brown needles.
A new COFORD report, Christmas Tree Research 2002, describes seed selection, field trials, research into feeding, pruning, and the spraying techniques that will produce the noblest fir of all. Alas, "current season needle necrosis" (brown needles) has yet to be cured.
From the website of the California Christmas Tree Association I have learned that Christmas trees are meant to be stood in water, like flowers; displaying them like this is even part of its members' code of ethics. To keep fresh a six-foot tree indoors, you cut a quarter-inch off the bottom of the trunk when you buy it and then stand it in a gallon of water.
With this tip from the high-tech state of Silicon Valley, I wish readers a Happy Christmas and an evergreen New Year.
Christmas Tree Research 2002 is available from COFORD at Agriculture Building, UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4.