By
noeleenm on January 31st, 2006
…Like the tradition passed on by my father, the scribe in our house with his lovely copperplate writing and elegant language learned in a school that he left at 12 years of age, of enclosing letters with Christmas cards to distant family and friends. I inherited the role of family scribe simply because I was the last one left at home when the task of writing all the cards and letters became too much for my Dad. So, with handwriting that closely resembles a drunken spider who staggered his way through an ink-pot, I took up tradition of writing to family and family friends whose names and addresses were recorded in an old laundry book. Many, many of them are gone now, but among the people I still write to every Christmas is a woman called Betty Hakes, a grandmother now who lives in Yorkshire, but is still referred to in our family as Betty O’Hara, the name she bore when I last saw her when she was around 13 years old.
Betty’s father, Jim O’Hara, was a Scotsman who came to our seaside town on his annual holidays first when he was a young single miner. He stayed in our house (we took in ‘lodgers’ in those days, during the summer, as almost every working class family in our town did), and he ‘did a line’ with my mother’s youngest sister, Nellie, for a time. Later they each went on to marry partners from their own countries, but Jim brought his new wife, Rose, to Ireland almost every year to stay in our house, and later he brought their daughter, Betty, and then their son, Nicky. By then, of course, they and our parents were far more friends than ‘lodgers’, and even when their children grew up and no longer came on holidays with them, Jim and Rose continued to come. And even when they became older and no longer able to travel, the Christmas cards and letters went faithfully back and forward year after year.
When Jim became too unwell to write himself, Betty took over the task, as I did in our house, and even when both our parents had gone to their heavenly reward we continue to write each year with both our families’ news. I wouldn’t know Betty if she stood in front of me, nor she me, but she’s as close and important a friend as people I see year in and year out. Some day we may even get around to actually visiting each other, but meanwhile I know that her Christmas card and letter to me - and mine to her - are as essential a part of the reality of Christmas as my family’s visits on Christmas morning…
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By
noeleenm on January 30th, 2006
Today I took down the last of the Christmas things - the crib and my three ‘Wise Men’ candles - and stored them safely and sadly away in the attic till next year. Sadly, because Christmas is still for me one of those magic times made for family and friends, when the rest of the world and its worries just have to wait. It can be a rushed time, it can be a very sad time for those who have experienced a recent loss, but even the rush has to do with getting ready for time spent with people you love, and even the grieving means there was someone in your life worth mourning…
I say ‘magic time’, and that has connotations of unreality. Yet, in many ways, Christmas is for me one of the times of the year when I am most in touch with reality. Before Christmas I sit down and write Christmas cards and letters (or e-mails nowadays) to family and friends, most of whom I don’t see nearly as often as I like, and many of whom I haven’t even written to since last Christmas. I haven’t any more time in my crowded (like everyone else’s) life before Christmas than I have during the rest of the year. In fact, if anything I have less, because of trying to clean and decorate the house, choose gifts, and finish off the work I know I’m not going to get back to until the New Year, whether paid work or flood campaign work. But I make space somewhere in the middle of it all to write the cards and the letters because at Christmas priorities shift back into an old, old perspective.
And all the Christmases of my life in this house exert their influence, too.
…Christmases when our parents, with precious little money to spare, made sure that Santa came in the early hours of the morning after a Midnight Mass whose way to and fro was sprinkled with neighbours shaking hands and wishing each other ‘A Very Happy Christmas’.
…Christmases marking the passing of the years by where we ate our Christmas dinner, moving gradually from a full family around the table at home to being invited to Christmas dinner and St. Stephen’s Day dinner in the homes of my two sisters as my brothers and sisters married and moved out to their own homes. But Christmas morning at home was kept sacrosanct in this house for all the family to come ‘home’ to see their parents/grandparents/great-grandparents - and each other.
I turned back from the gate one Christmas morning having seen one group off (as the next generation got older a ’shift’ system had to be employed, as all of them wouldn’t fit in our house at one time), and saw our house sitting in the winter sunshine with a Christmas wreath on the door, a pram parked outside beside a Harley Davidson motorbike, and the roadway behind me packed with grown up cars. My camera, of course, was buried somewhere in the crowded room within but my mind snapped a memory of a home full of its generations that I have never forgotten.
…Christmases when this house must have ached with the pain within it, after our brother, Christy, died suddenly at 37, leaving a wife and four young children behind, after our father and then our mother died, and then after our eldest brother, Tommy, followed our mother a year later, and our sister, Sally, just one year more behind.
…But those who were left held each other a bit closer each Christmas, and passed on to the younger ones coming up the tradition of Christmas and its faithfulness.
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