The Ghost of Christmas Past seems to be ever present this time of year – particularly for immigrants.
Think of it, do you fixate on home around St. Patrick’s Day, Memorial Day, or any other such holiday? But every time I hear Jingle Bells, I’m swept back to Wexford’s Main Street where I’m seven years old again staring at a blinking Christmas tree, my face lit up with delight.
I may have need of that memory, for every third Sunday in December for the last 17 years I’ve improvised a three-hour Yuletide show on Celtic Crush/SiriusXM. Much of the show is devoted to music but the audience has come to expect a journey down my memory lane.
Oddly enough, I’ve found the best way to cater to all tastes is through poetry, and often the more obscure, the better.
I don’t know who wrote the traditional Kerry Carol, but I suspect it was a woman and what a way with words she had.
Scuab an t-urlár agus glan an teallach
‘s coimead na gríasaigh beo
Ar eagla go dtiocfhaidh siad anocht,
Agus an domhan ‘na chodladh go suan!
It no longer seems to matter that the poem is in Irish, since so many listeners are familiar with at least cúpla focail and love the sound of the old tongue. Still I usually offer the translation:
Brush the floor and clean the hearth,
And set the fire to keep,
For they might visit us tonight
When all the world’s asleep!
Patrick Kavanagh.
Patrick Kavanagh is another who can ferry you back in time to a long gone rural Irish childhood.
“My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east,
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.”
James Joyce too can summons up memories of Christmas, though to me he’s much more about sculling pints on Bloomsday outside Ulysses pub on Stone Street. Still, he always brings me face to face with that rarity, an Irish White Christmas.
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”
Oh, to be able to conjure such an adjective for the broad majestic Shannon!
Dylan Thomas.
But it’s Dylan Thomas from Wales who really nails the poetry of Christmas for me. Those from New York can do a pilgrimage to The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in honor of the man.
For it’s there the poet departed none so gently into that good night after tossing back a multitude of whiskeys - his final words, “18! That’s a record.” Perhaps that why his “Child’s Christmas in Wales” always captures the innate tipsiness of the season.
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”
He effortlessly summonses a carefree boyhood in Mrs. Prothero’s garden where he and her son Jim bombard “cold and callous cats” with snowballs.
“Wolves and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats” whisk by as Aunt Dosie downs 3 aspirin and Aunt Hannah hits the parsnip wine, before the boy finally turns the gas down, crawls into bed and “says some words to the holy darkness” before sinking into dreamless sleep.
Meanwhile, you can watch this wonderful poem spring to life on the magical stage of The Irish Repertory Theatre until December 31st. I’ll be there in my Santa hat, sipping mulled wine, do join me.
Happy Christmas!
