A Very Irish Christmas
James Joyce
Edited Translations Copyright © 2021 New Vessel Press
“Shopping for Christmas Dinner” from The Green Road: A Novel by Anne Enright.
Copyright © 2015 by greengirl limited. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Whimsical Beasts” by Aisling Maguire was first published in
The Dolmen Book of Irish Christmas Stories 1986 by Colin Smythe Ltd. Copyright © Aisling Maguire.
“Christmas Pudding” by Colm Tóibín. Published by The New Yorker, 2010.
Copyright © Colm Tóibín. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powls Mews, London W11 1JN.
“The Troubles at Christmas” from Cal by Bernard MacLaverty, first published by Jonathan Cape 1983.
Copyright Bernard MacLaverty, 1983. First published as a Norton paperback 1995.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Men and Women” by Claire Keegan, excerpted from Antarctica, Copyright © 1999 by Claire Keegan.
Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
“The Tommy Crans” from Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen.
Copyright © 1981 by Curtis Brown Limited., Literary Executors of the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Another Christmas” from The Collected Stories by William Trevor. Copyright © 1992 by William Trevor. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Christmas Eve/Oiche Nolalg” by Máire Mhac a tSaoi. Translated by Gabriel Fitzmaurice.
Copyright © 1991, Máire Mhac a tSaoi and Translation Copyright © 1991 Gabriel Fitzmaurice.
First published in 1956 in her collection, Margadh na Saoire.
Cover design by Ashling Lindsay
Book design by Beth Steidle
Saint Agnes typeface © Great Lakes Lettering (www.GreatLakesLettering.com)
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Various
A Very Irish Christmas: The Greatest Irish Holiday Stories of All Time / various authors.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-939931-96-2
Library of Congress Control Number 2021935181
Ireland—Fiction
Table of Contents
THE WEXFORD CAROL
SHOPPING FOR CHRISTMAS DINNER
from The Green Road · Anne Enright
FRANK FORREST’S MINCE PIE
Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan
WHIMSICAL BEASTS
Aisling Maguire
THE CHRISTMAS CUCKOO
Frances Browne
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
Colm Tóibín
THE MAGI
W. B. Yeats
CANDLE AND CRIB
K. F. Purdon
THE TROUBLES AT CHRISTMAS
from Cal · Bernard MacLaverty
MEN AND WOMEN
Claire Keegan
THE TOMMY CRANS
Elizabeth Bowen
ANOTHER CHRISTMAS
William Trevor
CHRISTMAS EVE
Máire Mhac a tSaoi · Translated by Gabriel Fitzmaurice
THE DEAD
James Joyce
A Very
Irish
Christmas
The Wexford Carol
Good people all, this Christmas time,
Consider well and bear in mind
What our good God for us has done
In sending his beloved son
With Mary holy we should pray,
To God with love this Christmas Day
In Bethlehem upon that morn,
There was a blessed Messiah born
The night before that happy tide
The noble Virgin and her guide
Were long time seeking up and down
To find a lodging in the town
But mark right well what came to pass
From every door repelled, alas
As was foretold, their refuge all
Was but a humble ox’s stall
Near Bethlehem did shepherds keep
Their flocks of lambs and feeding sheep
To whom God’s angel did appear
Which put the shepherds in great fear
Arise and go, the angels said
To Bethlehem, be not afraid
For there you’ll find, this happy morn
A princely babe, sweet Jesus, born
With thankful heart and joyful mind
The shepherds went the babe to find
And as God’s angel had foretold
They did our Saviour Christ behold
Within a manger he was laid
And by his side a virgin maid
Attending on the Lord of Life
Who came on earth to end all strife
There were three wise men from afar
Directed by a glorious star
And on they wandered night and day
Until they came where Jesus lay
And when they came unto that place
Where our beloved Messiah lay
They humbly cast them at his feet
With gifts of gold and incense sweet.
Shopping for Christmas Dinner
ANNE ENRIGHT
ROSALEEN TOLD CONSTANCE SHE DID not want a present this year. She said it in a faint voice, meaning she would be dead soon so what was the point? What was an object—when you would not have it for long? Too much? Not enough? It was hard to say.
Constance thought she was immune to this sort of guff, but she also needed to tell her mother that she was not about to die so she went up to Galway and trawled through every last thing in the shops, until she found a thick silk scarf that was the same price as a new microwave and so beautiful you could not say what colour it was, except there was lilac in there and also pearl, all of which would be perfect for her mother’s complexion and for her silver-white hair.
“Oh I can’t remember,” she would say when her mother asked the price, or complained about the price. Times were good. Constance bought a wheel of Camembert, various boxes of chocolates, Parma ham and beautiful, small grapes that were more yellow than green. She got her hair done in a place so posh it didn’t look done at all. Then she drove back home through the winter darkness in the smell of PVC and ripening cheese, happy in her car. Constance loved to drive. It was the perfect excuse. For what, she did not know. But there was such simplicity to it: crossing great distances to stop an inch away from the kerb, opening the door.
The next morning she was back behind the wheel, picking Dan up from the airport, depositing him at her mother’s, back in to the butcher’s and a few things around town, a poinsettia for the cleaner, a trio of hyacinths for the cleaner’s mother who was in hospital in Limerick and could not understand a thing the doctors told her. The cleaner was from Mongolia, a fact that made Constance slightly dizzy. But it was just true. Her cleaner—good-hearted, a little bit vague with a duster—was from Ulan Bator. Constance left the presents with her money on the kitchen table, then back out to Ardeevin with the turkey and a quick tidy up while she was there: checking supplies, running a Hoover, thoug
h her mother hated the sound of the Hoover. After which, home to drive Shauna to a pal’s house, her fake tan leaving a shadow on the cream upholstery of the Lexus.
“Ooofff,” said Constance, when she saw it and then chastised her temper. That all her problems should be so small.
The next morning, she went early into Ennis. It was 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve and the supermarket was like the Apocalypse, people grabbing without looking, and things fallen in the aisles. But there was no good time to do this, you just had to get through it. Constance pushed her trolley to the vegetable section: celery, carrots, parsnips for Dessie, who liked them. Sausage and sage for the stuffing, an experimental bag of chestnuts, vacuum-packed. Constance bought a case of Prosecco on special offer to wrap and leave on various doorsteps and threw in eight frozen pizzas in case the kids rolled up with friends. Frozen berries. Different ice cream. She got wine, sherry, whiskey, fresh nuts, salted nuts, crisps, bags and bags of apples, two mangoes, a melon, dark cherries for the fruit salad, root ginger, fresh mint, a wooden crate of satsumas, the fruit cold and promising sweet, each one with its own sprig of green dark leaves. She got wrapping paper, red paper napkins, Sellotape, and—more out of habit, now the children were grown—packs and packs of batteries, triple A, double A, a few Cs. She took five squat candles in cream-coloured beeswax to fill the cracked hearth in the good room at Ardeevin, where no fire was lit this ten years past, and two long rolls of simple red baubles to fill the gaps on her mother’s tree. She went back for more sausages because she had forgotten about breakfast. Tomatoes. Bacon. Eggs. She went back to the dairy section for more cheese. Back to the fruit aisle for seedless grapes. Back to the biscuit aisle for water biscuits. She searched high and low for string to keep the cloth on the pudding, stopped at the delicatessen counter for pesto, chicken liver pâté, tubs of olives. She got some ready-cooked drumsticks to keep people going. At every corner, she met a neighbour, an old friend, they rolled their eyes and threw Christmas greetings, and no one thought her rude for not stopping to converse. She smiled at a baby in the queue for the till.
“I know!” she said. “Yes I know!” The baby considered her fully. The baby gave her a look that was complete.
“Yes!” she said again, and got the curl of a sweet, thoughtful smile.
All this kept Constance occupied until the time came to unload the contents of her trolley onto the conveyor. The baby held itself so proudly erect, the young mother underneath it looked like a prop. She looked like some kind of clapped-out baby stand.
“You’re doing great,” Constance told her. “You’re doing a great job.”
The bill came to four hundred and ten euros, a new record. She thought she should keep the receipt for posterity. Dessie would be almost proud.
Constance pushed her trolley onto the walkway and the wheels locked cleverly on to the metal beneath them, and she was happy happy happy, as she sank towards the car park. She thanked God from the burning, rising depth of herself for this unexpected life—a man who loved her, two sons taller than their father, and a daughter who kissed her still when no one was there to see. She could not believe this was the way things had turned out.
Her feet were swollen already; she could feel them throb, hot in the wrong shoes. Constance bumped the trolley off the walkway, set her trotters thumping across the concrete of the car park. It was half past eleven on Christmas Eve. In the pocket of her coat, her phone started to ring and, by the telepathy of the timing, Constance knew it was her mother.
“What is it, darling?” she said, remembering, as she did so, that she had forgotten the Brussels sprouts.
“He’s still asleep,” said Rosaleen. For a moment Constance thought she was talking about her father, a man who was not asleep, but dead.
“Well don’t wake him,” she said.
Dan. Of course, she meant Dan, who was jet-lagged.
“Should I?”
“Or maybe do. Yeah. Get him straightened out.”
There was a pause from Rosaleen. Straightened out.
“You think?”
“Have you everything?” said Constance.
“I don’t know,” said her mother.
“Don’t worry.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Rosaleen said, with a real despair in her voice; you would think she had just spent an hour in the insanity of the supermarket, not Constance.
“But I suppose it’s worth it to have you all here.”
“I suppose.”
“I’ll be sorry to see it go.” She was talking about the house again. Anytime she felt needy now, or lost or uncertain, she talked about the house.
“Right,” said Constance. “Listen, Mammy.”
“Mammy,” said Rosaleen.
“Listen—”
“Oh, don’t bother. I’ll let you go.” And she was gone.
It was Rosaleen, of course, who wanted Brussels sprouts, no one else ate them. Constance stood for a moment, blank behind the crammed boot of the Lexus. You can’t have Christmas without Brussels sprouts.
Sometimes even Rosaleen left them on her plate. Something to do with cruciferous vegetables, or nightshades, because even vegetables were poison to her when the wind was from the north-east.
“Oh what the hell,” said Constance. She slammed the boot shut and turned her sore feet back to the walkway and the horrors of the vegetable section. Then over to the spices to get nutmeg, which was the way Rosaleen liked her Brussels, with unsalted butter. And it was a good thing she went back up, because she had no cranberry sauce either—unbelievably—no brandy for the brandy butter, no honey to glaze the ham. It was as though she had thrown the whole shop in the trolley and bought nothing. She had no big foil for the turkey. Constance grabbed some potato salad, coleslaw, smoked salmon, mayonnaise, more tomatoes, litre bottles of fizzy drinks for the kids, kitchen roll, cling film, extra toilet paper, extra bin bags. She didn’t even look at the bill after another fifteen minutes in the queue behind some woman who had forgotten flowers—as she announced—and abandoned her groceries to get them, after which Constance did exactly the same thing, fetching two bouquets of strong pink lilies because they had no white left. She was on the road home before she remembered potatoes, thought about pulling over to the side of the road and digging some out of a field, imagined herself with her hands in the earth, scrabbling around for a few spuds.
Lifting her head to howl.
Back in Aughavanna she unpacked and sorted the stuff that would go over to Ardeevin for the Christmas dinner and she repacked that. Then she went to Rory’s room, where the child was sleeping off a hangover. Constance took off her shoes and climbed on to the bed behind him.
“Oh fuck,” he said.
“Your own fault,” said his mother, as she spooned into him, with the duvet between them and the wall at her back.
“Ah, Ma,” he said and flapped a big hand over his shoulder to find a bit of her, which happened to be the top of her head. But Rory was always easy to hold; easy to carry and easy to kiss, and there, in the smell of last night’s beer and his rude good health, fretful, lumpy Constance McGrath fell asleep.
In the evening she brought Shauna over to Ardeevin with the ingredients for the stuffing and they put it all together right there at the table in the big kitchen. Dan knew exactly what to do with the experimental bag of chestnuts. They chopped and diced, the three of them, while the others were at the pub, and they put the vegetables underwater for the next day while Rosaleen supervised happily from the chair by the range. Dan talked about Tim Burton with Shauna and they discussed the veins on Madonna’s arms. He asked a couple of excruciating questions about pop music; she asked about an artist called Cindy Sherman, and this just knocked Dan for six. He kissed the child before they left; he piled her hair on the top of her head, saying, “Look at you!” and Constance would have loved to stay longer, to be that thing, a grown-up child in her parents’ house, but she had presents to wrap back in Aughavanna and she did not get to bed, as it turned out, unti
l after two.
Frank Forrest’s Mince Pie
CANON PATRICK AUGUSTINE SHEEHAN
“I DECLARE, FRANK,” SAID MRS. Forrest, “that is the fourth mince pie you have eaten this evening. I am afraid, my boy, they will make you ill, so put away this one until tomorrow.”
Frank knew not how to disobey his beloved mother, so he promptly took up the delicacy and placed it in the cupboard. It was Christmas Eve. Presently a feeble, timid knock was heard; and, as cook was ever so busy preparing tarts and pies for the morrow, Frank ran to the door and opened it. A gust of sleety wind nearly lifted him from his feet, and a few snowflakes fell softly on the floor, and melted slowly on the carpet in the hall.
“Something for the children,” said a weak, faltering voice; and Frank saw before him a pale, delicate woman shivering in the icy wind. She had a child in her arms, looking sickly, and the snow had made a little crown for his head on the cloak which his mother had wrapped around him. She held another child by the hand, and its little rags flapped and fluttered, as the cruel storm tossed them, and pierced the little limbs with its icy needles.
“Stop a moment,” said Frank, who was a rough, brusque, manly lad, but had tender feelings, though he was unconscious of possessing them. In a few moments he returned with the following miscellany, several buns, scraps of cold meat, a paper of tea, a paper of soft sugar, a bunch of raisins, a wooden monkey on a stick, a battered doll, and, crowning all, his own mince pie, which he had put away for the morrow.
“God bless you, dear,” said the woman, as she opened her apron and wrapped up all these treasures; and a smile flashed across her face and lighted up her eyes, as if an angel had rushed by and touched and transfigured her.
Nine o’clock came, and Frank sat by his bedroom fire, watching the flames dancing and leaping, and gambolling around the bars. Then, slowly and reluctantly, he pulled off one shoe after another, and soon found himself nestling in his little cot, listening to the wild storm that shook the windows, and wondering where were the children resting whom he had seen that afternoon. Softly sleep stole upon him, and he closed his eyes in the peaceful slumber of boyhood.
