Christmas in Ireland is a snowdump of traditions from many different skies.
There are window candles that date from St Brigit’s time, nativity carols from the 1200s, boiled pudding from the 1300s and Christmas trees, partly from the tradition of burning native pines at Christmas and partly from decorated trees in the German tradition that were imported with the religious refugees of the 1700s.
Santa Claus came from the Netherlands, initially in a green coat. His eight reindeer with names came from an American poem of 1823, to which Rudolf was added in 1939, to the joy of nativity school play directors.
Santa’s first pre-Christmas visit was in 1895 as a geust at the fundraiser for the restoration of Kildare Cathedral. The marketing myth that he got his red coat from a Coca Cola advertising campaign in 1935 has been recently unwrapped. A Christmas pageant in Athy in 1926 had Santa on stage “resplendent in red with white fur and peaked cap.” Poor Herbert H. Painting (for it was he) “made several attempts to address the children, but failed each time, and eventually had to give up the task.”
The first Irish store started advertising visits to Santa in 1926 in Cork. Between 1932 and 1955, Santa was making celebrity appearances in Dublin, releasing gas-filled balloons from the roof at the Pims Brothers department store in Georges Street. From 1966 to 1990 the elaborate Christmas window at Switzers on Grafton street was a seasonal spectacle, a childhood memory for many, before the store became Brown Thomas.
As for snow, during the first eight years of Charles Dicken’s life there was a white Christmas every year. His writings inspired snow-themed cards and festive movies. Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby did the rest.
Ireland’s last real white Christmas was 1915, when we had a fall of nine inches. The “white” Christmasses of 1970 and 2010 were sprinklings by comparison.
Big Christmas & little Christmas
In Ireland we had two days of lavish hospitality, notlaic mór, Great Christmas and notlaic beg, Little Christmas, and a bountiful period in between. Even the austere Ceile Dé who established Castledillon in the marshes between Straffan and Celbridge allowed three days of festivities at Christmas.
It had its own gamchorgus, or winter lent, six weeks of fast and abstinence leading up to Christmas, carefully avoiding a clash with the Feast of St Martin which a strict 40 day observance would create. The Féilire of Tallaght instructs: “before high Christmas you should make great prayer at the beginning of lent.”
Until the last century midnight mass was celebrated at ruined and disused churches in some locations. Canon John O’Hanlon recorded a beautiful south Meath tradition in 1870 that the congregation could hear the tolling of the lost bells around the ruined churches at midnight on Christmas Eve.
Christmas, Easter and Pentecost were the three days when everyone in the congregation received communion. Weekly communion was rare. In 1822, the average receiving communion each month was 272. In most parishes one third of the congregation did not receive communion at all.
1500: Enter the turkey
The goose was king of Christmas. Unusually, the flesh of a goose had its own name in old Irish: driuch, as opposed to géd (modern gé). Partridges and guinea fowl became associated with Christmas because winter time was the season for the hunting of wild fowl, which had to be consumed quickly in the days before refrigeration.
The turkey was known as frang-cach or French cock in old Irish, suggesting it first arrived from France. It was imported from Madagascar via Turkey to England and via India to France, hence the names turkey and d’Inde.
First encountered in the 1500s, it became popular in the 1700s as an exotic dish for the grandees. The household of Louisa and Tom Conolly of Castletown consumed an average of two turkeys a week in the 1780s. By the 1860s it was widely affordable, advertised at 3/6 by a Celbridge butcher, compared with 10/- in the 1830s. Bertram Barton of Straffan House supplied 12 turkeys for the refugees from war torn Belgium in Celbridge hospital for Christmas 1914.
Widespread availability of white turkey meat in the mid 1950s established the turkey as new king of Christmas, before turkey consumption began to decline from an inordinate high over the past 25 years.
The first Christmas present
The first recorded Christmas present in Irish history was in the chaos of Christmas 1539 when Gerald FitzGerald was on the run after the rebellion of his half brother, Silken Thomas. He was sent a gift by Art Óg Ó Tuatháil, “a saffirn sherte dressed with silke, and a mantell of Inglish cloth fringed with silke, and certen money”.
Gifts went both ways. The Book of Lismore specifies Christmas as a day when the monastic tenant (manach) were obliged to provide a meal for the clergy.
Rent rolls from 1518 show the Earl of Kildare required his tenants to deliver a cartload of wood and one truss of straw at Christmas. Every house on their massive estates had to contribute a hen to the castle, every dealer in beer to supply four gallons of ale.
Joseph Carter’s rent in 1707, of a property where Celbridge post office is today, required him to supply two fat pullets every Christmas Eve to his landlords, the Dongan family, “or contribute two shillings in lieu.”
Under a 1783 lease, Michael Gerrard of Stacumney had to supply ”five barrels of good oates every Christmas” to his landlord, the Ballyshannon MP Michael Cromie.
Christmas condition
Christmasses were, predictably, well irrigated. When the Galway Mail Coach spilled into the river Rye at Leixlip after encountering an icy patch at full gallop on Christmas Eve in 1835, passengers were assured that the driver was not in “that Christmas kind of condition”
The men who worked on Castletown estate got a Christmas bonus of £1 each 1814; at the time their weekly wedge was 8/6.
Bishop James Warren Doyle noted in 1822 who distributed the milk of twenty to thirty cows to the poor, and who killed and boiled a bullock at Christmas for them.
Lady Emily Alma Brooke of Pickering used to distribute crochet shawls to people in the cottages in the 1890s and 1900s.
From earliest times, Christmas was political. Annalists of 1,000 years ago write of “the fear” of being summoned to spend Christmas with the king, as, if you did not show up, he was likely to march on your territory the following year (“hospitality or hospital” might be a Blackadder sketch).
Turning up at Windsor castle for Christmas dinner with William Rufus for Christmas 1095 propelled the founder of the FitzGerald dynasty to a place of prominence that led to the family dominating the politics of Kildare for 700 years.
For two hundred years from 1582 to 1752, Irish Christmas and English Christmas were eleven days apart. The people observed the Gregorian calendar while the Colonial regime in Dublin Castle kept the Julian calendar. As a result, the Irish would not regard 1648 and 1657 as White Christmasses, the English would.
Amidst the political conflict of a century ago, there were street celebrations for the release of prisoners on December 23 1916 and again in 1921, in contrast with the grim pre-Christmas executions in the Curragh in 1922 and the death of Joseph Lacey from Wexford in the Curragh on Christmas Eve 1924.
Stockwell’s Christmas truce
Clifton Stockwell, who was responsible for handing the Curragh over from the English to Irish army in 1922, has his own place in Christmas history.
On Christmas day 1914, he arranged an unofficial truce on the western front with his German counterpart Baron Maximillian von Sinner and a famous soccer match between opposing forces (thanks to Seamus Cullen for drawing our attention to this).
Religion of retail.
Commercial Christmas was largely tilled into existence by American shop owners in the 1840s, initially as a ploy to empty out their end of year stock. Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel Little Women gave us the line “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” an early sign we were about to move away from the religion of Christianity towards the religion of retail.
Household Christmas spend has declined relative to income in recent decades. What was regarded a treat once a year is nowadays commonplace accelerated spend: 3pc of our annual outlay is spent on Christmas compared with 9pc by our grandparents. Even so, each Irish citizen will spend an average of €54,000 on Christmas presents during their lifetime. New York economist Joel Waldfogel reckons we waste between 10pc and 30pc of our Christmas spend on unwanted gifts.
Nobody is sure where the elf on the shelf came from, how a harmless self-published poem in 2005 by an Atlanta-based music teacher, Carol Aebersold, turned into a chore.
Several parents would dearly love to track that genius down.
Nollag shona, and may all your Christmasses bring delight.
