Living Greener: Pledge to have a real Christmas this year
Wrensday fun in Dingle
THIS week is Thanksgiving in the USA, where most of my cousins – and most Irish people – now live.
It’s one of my favourite holidays – spiritual without being limited to any religion, ritualistic yet flexible enough to encompass many cultures, and still relatively un-commercialised.
It’s a simple ritual: all your aunts and uncles and cousins gather together for a supper, and before they eat, give thanks for everything the Lord gave them this year.
Another holiday that many North American Irish have adopted, including my family there, is St Nicholas Day 6 December.
We leave our shoes out, and St Nicholas steals one in the night and leaves fruit or candy in it for the children.
Among my family, he leaves tins of fish – perhaps a ritual picked up from our fishing ancestors.
Thus, it was that last year, as I tried to sleep in, a metre-high blond girl began jumping up and down on me, shouting, "Look what St Necklace brought us!" I liked the "us" - she was as happy for me as for herself. She got a necklace on this day a year or two ago, and the name stuck.
Here in the countryside, our Christmas seasons are small and somewhat isolated, but these moments make them meaningful.
Meaning is something we often lack in modern Christmas celebrations, where we feel pressured to spend too much, eat too much, drink too much, listen to the same few terrible pop songs over and over, watch brainless television specials, put up enough lights to make our house visible from space and pretend to be cheerful when we are not.
This pop-culture version of Christmas is squeezing out the many local and truly traditional family rituals that date back longer than we can measure.
Take, for example, Wren Day, where local families gathered in the nearby woods for the Hunting of the Wren.
Local men dressed up as “wren boys” and told the children the story of the wren, and the “straw boys” who wanted to hunt it.
As they told the story, though, men dressed in straw costumes – the Straw Boys – snuck up behind them, grabbed the wren and ran off, through the woods, with the Wren Boys and all the children giving chase.
After all the children had been nicely exhausted – while their parents sat back sipping tea around the fire – the Wren Boys and children came back holding the Wren in triumph.
When last I checked, the local Wren Day had been abandoned, as no one could afford the insurance premiums.
A ritual unique to the Irish, which might date back to Druid times, will soon be another casualty of the great forgetting of our era; my daughter might be one of the last people who will remember it.
I would love to see people re-enact Wren Day in their own area, even in hiding, as we Irish once had hedge schools to teach our culture in secret.
I also encourage people to begin wassailing again – gathering with neighbours and walking from house to house singing Christmas carols, giving everyone a chance to meet their neighbours.
Many families do use Christmas to see loved ones, share meals, sing songs together, and tell old stories, and that’s wonderful.
But here’s the thing: people used to do these things every day.
Here in Ireland, for example, wassailing wasn’t just once a year, but all through the winter; neighbours gathered at each others’ homes, brought instruments, played music, sang songs, and told stories that broke up the long darkness.
It allowed each family to share what they had, making deposits in a community favour bank.
It strengthened the feeling of community, so that burdens were lessened because they were shared, and joys were heightened because they were shared.
Every day used to be more like the best parts of Christmas today.
This year, pledge to have a real Christmas – turn off the television and the pop hits, sing old hymns together, read to your children, make gifts with them, and perhaps go carolling at the doors of your elderly neighbours.
You’re not here for the holiday; it’s here for you.
When I was raising my daughter in the countryside, every Christmas became sacred.
The holiday was our time for comfort and joy, not pop songs and debt.
Those moments, with her climbing into bed with me and sharing her contagious awe, were what was holy, and when I prayed, they were the engine of my gratitude.
