It was one of those magical Irish Yuletide days when amidst all the Hubble and bubble of family preparations, even the most secular of our inhabitants was hard-put not to spare a word for Christmas. If truth be told, my little village was sleep-walking towards the great day. We children were gliding on cloud nine and school had stopped for the year, with schoolbags safely de-commissioned, hidden under the stairs.
Meanwhile, on the narrow boulevard which passed for a main street, the locals had universally entered into a temporary pact of bonhomie. I imagined local quarrelling farmers lending themselves sets of pliers to cut free the sheep that sometimes got enmeshed in barbed-wires. Sworn enemies who had hardly a polite word for each other for most of the secular year, had taken to smiling across the street with convincing expressions of goodwill that might have been trained at the Dublin Drama School. It was an upside-down world that could only be explained by either an omnipresent God or one of his emissaries, Father Christmas. Anyways, putting no finer slant on it, but with all this congeniality, the townland had temporarily gone “Christmas-mad.”
My family shared a wonderful secret. Mam, that resilient holy saint of a woman, was to all intents and purposes the entire village’s clandestine Santa. Ever-thrifty, mam ran a catalogue from one of the nicest Dublin stores. Goods were available by mail the whole year round at discounted prices, and dispatched by the nation-wide post office. It was a predecessor of modern internet shopping, although the choices were made, not by web, but from a faded catalogue. It had the potential to bring clothing, perfumes, toys, and even foodstuffs of a type not available at Flaherty’s grocery or anywhere else in Donegal.
There was just one snag in this process, which had begun to cause pangs of nervousness across the village. The Met-Eireann weather forecast was getting gloomy and we were beginning to wonder if Santa Claus would come with all the meteorological-storms threatening the North Pole. The Post-Office has already warned of unprecedented delays and Father Christmas marshalled the airwaves of Radio Eireann to caution children that even he himself might be disrupted.
Santa was fulsomely apologetic, explaining his elves were getting older and slower, and his reindeer’s night-vision was down. We hoped our air-force or maybe the national air-line, Aer Lingus, could help out. We knew of the big Irish jumbo planes that ferried hundreds of passengers every day from Shannon to New York, Boston and Chicago, and to all points American which had been inhabited in the past two centuries by droves of hardworking Irish.
And as we ruminated on deploying Plan A’s and Plan B’s in case of weather disaster, we caught sight of the green Irish post-van making its way up the steep hill into our little village. It appeared to be absolutely loaded with presents, so much so that hampers and boxes of goodies were festooned on its very roof. I never saw the postie with such a look of relief on his face as he unloaded his precious cargo. Parcels from Dingle, Kerry, and Galway. Presents from England, and even as far away as Australia, America, and Canada. And resplendent among them all, the bright cartons from my mom’s catalogue. Despite all our fears, and our childhood plan that Santa might end up desperately astride an Aer Lingus plane, Christmas had still arrived.
The local grocer, a woman usually not known for generosity, took the unprecedented step of coming out from behind her counter and distributing mince pies to all and sundry. As if smitten by the same “generosity bug”, did the local apothecary come out from the chemists and start giving away fragrant candles. This was a sight never seen before! To top it all, the parish priest arrived and got out of his limousine and started handing out sweets. Even the street dogs wanted a bit of the action and started to bark in participation. We children began to think it was not so much a case of Christmas spirit, as seasonal madness.
Ancient enemies hugged each other openly in the public streets, without even a preceding aperitif of stout to gird them up. The postie was stood a drink in the local pub with the tort (if misleading instruction) that if he drank it quickly it would offer no impediment to his driving. In the middle of it all, the local political representative arrived seeking to photograph the village at Christmas. That request would surely have been refused save for the fact that we could see in the back of his car – he had an enormous box of Christmas goodies to give out. And I, in my innocence, learned that day, the cruel lesson that everyone has their price.
And as I look at this happy scene, I exaggerate not, that I saw sworn enemies make peace for that day and say nothing more insulting to one another than animated discussion on the nomenclature of John Deer’s tractor assembly. I saw gossipy neighbours suddenly share the nostalgia of good times of village fetes. Even the bloody schoolmistress, a woman whose usual countenance I assumed to be due to her uncomfortably tight underwear, seemed happy for the day.
Another curmudgeon who rarely had a nice thing to say about anyone, was already dancing a jig with the local publican. And as I stared up into the winter sun setting; to cap it all, I observed God had got his icing-machine out. Slowly but surely, it had become a white Christmas. Tiny snowy granules were gently dusting the roofs of the little village like icing on a cake. And I thought to myself, that just as a snowflake’s existence is brief but beautiful, so are such moments of genuine happiness. Treasure them!
– Martin Duffy
Martin Duffy is a student on the MFA in Creative Writing. This piece is inspired by his earliest childhood memories which are a frequent source of stimulus in creative writing, which spans non-fiction and autofiction prose. He has worked extensively with the Irish Folklore Commission and the Sound Archives of National Museums, Northern Ireland. He particularly specializes in succinct vignettes of conflict memoir and the Irish short-story form. Some of his recordings are digitised as part of the British Library’s “Save our Sounds” Collections.