The Christmas I share with Paddy Kavanagh

When in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, Patrick Kavanagh writes,

“Cassiopeia was over

Cassidy’s hanging hill,

I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.”

I know exactly what he saw, me too one very clear crisp Christmas night, they were making their way in bright moonlight up the hill towards Scardaun not far from Roscommon town. I was astonished, they were so clearly outlined against the sky. God knows, they were a long way off course; with that sense of direction I'd recommend giving up following stars.

It was not hard for a child brought up on miracle-laden gospel stories, fairy stories, ghost stories, Celtic legends and Aesop’s fables to see three kings on the slope of a hill. With a lively imagination, a child might turn from the ghostly shadows in the corners of his bedroom to the distant horizon outside his window and know, categorically, that there are no borders; not between Heaven and Earth nor Ard Mhaca and Tombstone.

Sure, I watched for travelling stars at Christmas, and, come Good Friday, I expected the Heaven’s floor to be ripped open and God’s fury to be visited on the town in an horrific display of lightning bolts at exactly three o’ clock in the afternoon. Easter Sunday, I expected to see the beams of light radiate from between the clouds, the glory of God the Father extending out over the land.

In my childhood, the year was measured out in religious festivals, all of which had direct bearings on our lives. An apparition seemed to me to be a very likely event given the fact that our family said the rosary each night, and I was considered a shoe-in for the priesthood. I was petrified at the notion of God or Our Lady arriving into my bedroom full of flash and bang, and calculated at a very young age that my best chance of avoiding such an appalling possibility was to ditch the whole religion thing completely.

But the beauty of Kavanagh’s poem! He reminds us that the child of those days and that upbringing expected and saw the signs of Heaven in the world around him:

“The light between the ricks of hay and straw

Was a hole in Heaven's gable”.

His retelling of a Christmas morning in which his father’s music sailed over the fields to the Lennons and Callans, clear as water, and further, way, way, away, to the universe where the stars themselves were dancing to his tune. How he hurried into his trousers to be out into that Christmas morning, into a world made magnificent with the

“winking glitter of a frosty dawn”.

How wonderful it is to have memories from home so magical; how pure that dream flowing down the years of growing. And when those years finally turned over, and the boy was a man, how could he leave Monaghan behind him; wasn’t there a perfection to the old life? Wasn’t the spirit of the child as pure and brilliant as that Christmas morning?

And how could I leave Roscommon behind, and the magnificence of those same pristine, frosty mornings still sparkling in my head. Those were the mornings that filled you with such unexpected happiness that you broke into a run, the only way to disperse the energy that was surging up inside you.

And then Christmas; no question as to the magic. If it was a sun-bright frosty morning, Heaven was already smiling. And as to the wonders of the day, of course, Santa could fit down a chimney; anyone who can circumnavigate the world in a sleigh pulled by a team reindeers can fit down a chimney. At about noon the smell of Uncle Brendan’s cigar kicked off the festivities, there was a jug of orange squash in the middle of the dinner table and the lights on the tree were the stars taken down from the sky.

Sure enough Adulthood and geography make Christmas something else; life changes everything. What was magical is rationalized and the excitements of childhood find some other vent. But the well of childhood continues to pour out its Christmas gifts; the memories that colour my mind make the day special despite those distances. I rise a little later, and there’s not quite the rush to get down to the sitting room, but the day blooms into happiness, and there’s that same celebration of being alive.