The shape of an Irish Christmas

Christmas and the Irish: A Miscellany
Salvador Ryan (ed.)
Dublin: Wordwell Press
November 2023
388 pages
ISBN: 9781913934934

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With trees already glowing in the nation’s windows and notes of tinsel pop jingling in the shops, the Christmas season arrives with its waves of excitement and ennui for the participant. Whether one embraces it or dreads it, it is useful to re-orient the season around its pivotal moment – Christmas Day itself – and what it commemorates. Christmas and the Irish: A Miscellany, edited by Salvador Ryan, represents one way to do this. Far from a devotional or pious text, the volume gathers numerous brief essays, by various contributors, on aspects of Christmas. Whether historical, literary, cultural, theological, or contemporary, each contribution shares Christmas and the wider season as its unifying theme.

Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth. His interests include medieval and early-modern devotional writings and practices in Ireland and Europe and he published previously on these topics. However the present volume echoes most closely a trilogy of similar miscellanies edited by Ryan and published by Wordwell in recent years – Birth and the Irish (2021), Marriage and the Irish (2019), and Death and the Irish (2016). The guiding principles are similar – brief articles by various authors on a common theme as it relates to Ireland. Christmas and the Irish features seventy-five essays recounting Irish perspectives on the Christmas season. Events from the seventh century to the twenty-first are covered, from the strictly historical, to the literary, to memoir and interview.

This collection strikes a more humane tone than the typically rarefied compositions of academe. All the same, many of the contributors in this eclectic group are university academics and researchers. Independent scholars, however, clergy, and others bring their voices and interests too. While Ryan’s editorial eye and pen maintain a laudable sense of consistency, some contributions inevitably vary in tone and depth.

Niamh Wycherley, a medieval historian at Maynooth University, plumbs the earliest written Irish sources for references to Christmas. Indeed the marked scarcity of references to the season is revealing in itself, with Wycherley conceding that in pre-Norman Ireland “Christmas was not the big festival that it is today.” This is echoed in Ireland’s non-written records, such as high crosses, which bear “potentially only one depiction of the Nativity […], while depictions of the Crucifixion and the Passion are almost ubiquitous.” Arguably this might also be due to the nature of the medium – a cross – which is telling the story of the central event in salvation history. On the other hand, however, Irish high crosses do bear carvings of Adam and Eve and the Fall, so other biblical events are recorded there too. 

Wycherley also observes that medieval Irish texts writing about this time of year tended to focus on the scarcity of sunlight – a finding echoed by Fr Conor McDonough OP in his contribution. McDonough argues that references to light, in connection with Christ’s birth, and in the depths of winter, are dominant motifs in early Irish manuscripts. Describing a seventh-century manuscript containing the earliest Irish reference to the decreasing darkness and growing daylight from Christmas onwards, McDonough jokingly remarks that this represents “the first reference in Irish history to the famous ‘grand stretch in the evenings’.” 

Other essays cast a darker shadow. A number of the contributions to the volume recall Christmases that were far from peaceful or plentiful, instead marked by hunger, disease, and violence. One essay by Denis Casey, based at the University of Burgos in Spain, recalls a poignant prayer scribbled on the margins of a legal text by Hugh MacEgan, a Gaelic scribe, in 1350. With the Black Death ravaging Europe, an anxious Hugh recorded that “I myself am full twenty-one years old,” later imploring “[…] and let every reader in pity recite a ‘pater’ for my soul […] the year of the great plague.” (The “pater” is shorthand for the “Pater Noster” or “Our Father” prayer.) Remarkably, a twenty-two year old Hugh returned to the same page a year later, adding a further note that “It is just a year tonight since I wrote the line below; and, if it be God’s will, may I reach the anniversary of this great Eve once more. Amen. Pater Noster.” The “Eve” in question is Christmas Eve. While our Christmas Eves are often marked by anticipation and good cheer, poor Hugh’s were encumbered by the real possibility that he might perish before the year is out. Even as the feast celebrates a great birth, death’s grasp was never far from plague-ridden Europe.

Although brief, Hugh’s notes offer a fascinating glimpse into a bleak midwinter in medieval Ireland. The plague was clearly sufficiently serious that MacEgan was prompted to return to the petition he wrote the year before, in thanksgiving for the year gone, and in petition for safety in the year to come. The plague brought not only disease and death to those afflicted, but significant anxieties and fears for the future to those who lived in its midst. The repeated petitions of the young and anxious Hugh attest to this. Life was unpredictable and capricious in a way that the abundant scaffolds of our modern health and welfare systems make hard to conceive. The “great Eve” of Christmas has not always been accompanied by hope and expectation, but the more forbidding threats of disease and death.

Equally, the written records from this time can also teach us that life must go on. A few decades later, in 1397, Christmas saw an unexpected visitor land upon our shores. No, not from the North Pole! In her contribution to the volume, Tara Shields describes how Ramon de Perellos, a Catalan knight and diplomat, undertook a journey to Lough Derg, stopping in Dublin, Drogheda, and Dundalk on his way. Lough Derg was the location of St Patrick’s Purgatory, a place of pilgrimage that was evidently known to men and women on continental Europe. It was also a place of the liminal, where Perellos hoped to discover the fate of his recently deceased patron, King John I of Aragon, and speak with him once more. His papers record his encounters with the locals, both in the Pale and beyond.

In Dublin, Perellos was received by Roger Mortimer, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and John Colton, Archbishop of Armagh, both of whom tried to dissuade him from continuing his journey into the depths of Gaelic Irish territory. Unperturbed, Perellos forged deeper, where he met Niall Óg Ó Neill, king of Tír Eoghan, and of whom he recounts “I celebrated the feast of Christmas with him.” Readers hoping for a glimpse into the glamour of a Gaelic chieftain’s court should prepare to be disappointed: Perellos’ portraits are unflattering. Yet, since they are from a “third party” and therefore outsider to any local conflicts, their veracity is probably not in doubt.

Perellos records that the great Gaelic lords wore a simple tunic with “no leggings, or shoes, or breeches,” while “the poor people go naked but they all wear those mantles – good or bad.” Christmas dinner was an equally scant affair, and troublingly for a Southern European, there was “neither bread to eat nor wine to drink.” Nevertheless the poor were looked after: Perellos recorded that he “saw the king order generous alms of beef to be given.” Thus even in 1397 Christmas was marked by goodwill and giving – though what was given was genuinely sustaining and necessary, rather than the superfluity that marks today’s gifting in many circumstances.

Perellos’ recollections attest to the harsh circumstances that winters in Ireland brought, and what it meant to have a limited and fragile food supply. Nevertheless, the account also uncovers the hospitality and welcome that is synonymous with this feast even today, as a stranger is welcomed amongst them and given the best of what is available. This time there was room at the inn.

Ryan’s book is peppered with numerous other fascinating essays. Regina Sexton, a UCC-based food historian, has contributed a number of chapters on the culinary feasts, fasts, and traditions surrounding this period. Contributions later in the volume move towards the present-day, exploring poetry and song, such as the “Wexford Carol,” and an insightful exploration of the origins of “Once in Royal David’s City” (whose lyrics were written by a nineteenth-century Irish Anglican woman). Christmas recollections from the Schools’ Folklore Collection, that precious treasury of indigenous cultural knowledge gathered by Irish schoolchildren almost a century ago, form the central material of another chapter.

Not every essay is robust. Perhaps this is to be expected given that there are seventy-five of them in the volume. Bairbre Cahill’s chapter promising a “dive deeper” on the concept of incarnation is disappointingly superficial. Natalie Wynn’s paper on “Christmas and the Irish Jews” promised much by its title – an insight into how the season was lived and recalled, even if not celebrated, by this minority in Ireland in times past. However after a brief description of Chanukah, which tends to occur around the same time as the Christmas and Advent period, historical detail waned, and the essay drifted instead into the awkward prose and occasionally patronising tone of contemporary academic discourse.

Nevertheless, with seventy-five contributions exploring a variety of literary, historical, and cultural aspects of an Irish Christmas, authors are bound to strike different notes. Ryan’s volume has much to recommend it overall. It would make a great gift for those with interests in the historical and literary, but equally those who are less patient readers. While each essay features a brief  “Sources and Further Reading”  list at the end, the intimidating lexical paraphernalia of academe, such as footnotes and endnotes, are refreshingly absent. And at no more than five or six pages in length, no essay is exhaustingly long. Each one is bite-sized enough for even the most impatient reader, and pithy enough to read in one sitting. And even after reading, there is often enough material for the mind to savour and digest before returning for another portion.

Perhaps most valuably, the collection offers a healthy balance between the sobering and the joyful. Christmas through the centuries was not the season of warmth, gift-giving, and good cheer that is, in some ways, a commercial and cultural construct today. Arguably the contemporary world’s Christmas remains the exception rather than the rule. Today’s material plenitude and idealised gatherings go against the grain of disease, hunger, conflict, and death that afflicted our forebears in times past. Yet even then, the volume’s more sombre contributions offer rays of light, such as in the voice of a young scribe or in the hospitality shown to a stranger, as recounted above.

Having already covered births, marriages, deaths, and now Christmas from an Irish perspective, one wonders what other themes Salvador Ryan could explore in this miscellany format. Feast days and the Irish? Education and the Irish? Health and the Irish? Music and the Irish? The thematic possibilities are numerous. With an equally ambitious line-up of contributors, Ryan could oversee another insightful and valuable volume. For now, Christmas and the Irish offers a kaleidoscope of views and voices for this season.