Families bound by memories of Christmas past
IONLY realised how stressful Christmas was for some families when, back in the 1980s, I asked a girl how her Christmas had been. She said that previous Christmases were marred by a simmering feud between her brothers, but this year had gone comparatively better. Her brothers were civil when they met, civil while opening presents and civil during the pre-dinner drinks. Indeed they were so civil that, when both went to occupy the same chair at dinner, each stood back, repeatedly insisting that the other take it, until the eldest brother got so frustrated with all this civility that he smashed the chair over his brother’s skull.
People find this story oddly comforting: it makes any stress in their own Christmases pale by comparison. I lost touch with her but I suspect her two brothers still grumpily sit down together every year and their children – and perhaps by now their grandchildren – all glance at this same chair and hold their breath. They sit down together because this is what families do at Christmas. Sometimes they argue, always they catch up, reminisce about absent relations, evoke precious memories and relive – through their children’s excitement – the wonder of their own Christmas childhood memories. They become conscious of how time has passed, how family members have grown up or aged since last Christmas. Amid diverse and busy lives, they grow conscious of the chain of familial memory that binds them.
This is not true of all families. For some, Christmas Eve is summed up in the poet Michael Hartnett’s childhood memories of that night in a small Irish town: “In the pubs the men filled up with porter and in the homes the women filled up with apprehension.” For others, Christmas is a time of loneliness when they long for absent loved ones. For some, it can be an occasion for deliberate seclusion, a declaration of personal independence by staking their claim to spend it alone – not because they are lonely or obstinate but as an expression of their right to be themselves.
The late Sheila Fitzgerald – an independent thinker who led an alternative lifestyle up until her 90th year in a caravan crammed with books and stray animals – considered it pure heaven to spend Christmas Day outdoors birdwatching on the Wexford slobs: a tiny old woman whose yellow oilskins reflected in the winter sun like a burnished flame. One Christmas Eve, two elderly women – both recently widowed – turned up like runaways at her caravan, having fled from family invites to celebration. They couldn’t cope with well-intended pressure to be part of a collective happiness. They wanted to spend Christmas in their own way. Sheila did not possess much but gave her unexpected visitors the greatest gift you can offer anyone at Christmas – the right to simply be themselves.
My main childhood Christmas memory is sad: today is the 48th anniversary of my mother’s burial. Yet such a Christmas tragedy only brought my family closer together: my two older sisters and brother went out of their way always to look out for me. No Christmas passes without us remembering the family members we have lost, but also celebrating new arrivals or relations home from abroad. The benedictions of the birth of two new great-nieces will make this Christmas a special one.
In the intense bustle before Christmas, everyone has a mental ‘to-do list’ when queuing in busy shops. Yet I always try to find one moment to pause and recall the people now gone who shaped me into who I am. Amid the flurry and glitter I recall them not in a sad way, but in all their vitality and happiness, saluting their memory and how each of them left me enriched. Having cherished their memory, I move on to cherish the living: the loved ones who will be around me hopefully for many Christmases to come.
ON Monday, thousands of families will sit down together – both those who do so regularly and rarely. They may sit in easy friendship or uncomfortable proximity. But they will be bound by a necklace of Christmas memories, with new arrivals heralded, absences felt and Skyped conversations never quite able to replace the physical presence of emigrants unable to make it home.
But we won’t all be with our families. Migrant workers will gather in rented houses, like our relations did in Kilburn decades ago, enjoying the company but wishing they were at home. Dublin’s Mansion House will be filled with a babble of accents as strangers sit together for dinner. In Tallaght and Letterkenny and Clonmel, parents will tell children about past Christmases in Latvia and Poland; voices in 50 languages speaking to grandparents in China or Nigeria or Brazil. Individuals will sit alone with meals for one and friends will go walking on Howth Head or Rosslare Strand. Elderly couples may sense that this could be their last Christmas alone together and young couples may simply wish for the living space to be alone.
There will be toasts and photo albums taken down from attics, children seeing their parents different in the light of stories of Christmas long past.
Amid the bustle, there will be a sense that this is who we are and that the people we sit down with – regularly or irregularly – are those who know us inside out. While nothing is certain in this very uncertain world, we sense that, if we survive another year, then we will all sit down together again next year, for the same stories and same sense of being part of an everchanging and yet constant interlinking tapestry of lives that only truly come into perspective in the still midwinter when the bustle is over and we pause to take stock in the quietude of our hearts.
Amid the bustle, there will be a sense that this is who we are and that the people we sit down with – regularly or irregularly – are those who know us inside out