When I was a child everything closed down on December 8th and we went to Dublin in an Austin A40.
The postal service in Cavan was a pure cod. That’s what my mother often said when the Christmas cards arrived on the second day of January. I used to drop my letter for Santa in the postbox outside the Market Square, but that was usually a day or two before Christmas Eve, so no one could convince me that a letter with no address would ever get to the North Pole.
Dublin was the only chance to get a word in Santa’s ear, just after Mammy had completed her quest for the fabled Hafner’s sausages and white puddings that were so essential in her turkey stuffing.
After that we’d head over to see the fat man with the white beard in his red dressing gown in Arnotts. Mammy seemed to swallow the performance hook, line and sinker, so I usually ignored the fact that Santa’s arse could hardly contain itself on the chair he was sitting on, never mind trying to manoeuvre it down our chimney, even if there wasn’t a coal fire burning in the grate below.
Simply put, this was a fake Santa, no matter how many adults believed him. But I didn’t want to be the one to tell Mammy that.
And when I turned to gawk, I slipped on the sanctuary steps and the Mother of God went skidding across the marble floor
In my letter that year I said I wanted a bicycle. I was too old for teddies. So I asked for a Raleigh. But in the ear of the beardy man at Santa’s grotto, I opted for the teddy; I told him I’d love another cuddly bear.
Chimney sweep
It was a bicycle that arrived in the yard on Christmas morning, certain proof, my mother asserted, that Santa had received the letter.
“He couldn’t get it down the chimney,” Mammy explained. Although I noticed that he couldn’t manage to tear the price docket off the front wheel either.
After that I was sceptical about Christmas for a few years. But when I was 13 I found a kind of enlightenment. That year I carried the Virgin Mary, with the aid of another altar boy, from the sacristy, across the sanctuary to the crib. She was as big as either of us. But when we saw the skinny girl in a Loreto uniform lighting a candle, my friend said, “There’s that one from Stradone.”
And when I turned to gawk, I slipped on the sanctuary steps and the Mother of God went skidding across the marble floor.
Fortunately there were only a few scratches on her fingers so we picked her up and got her into the manger with her eyes focused on the baby Jesus and her hands joined.
When the people gathered around the crib that Christmas night I was terrified someone might notice the damage. The bishop, an old man with enormous white eyebrows, gave the crib a skite of holy water. Drops landed on Mary’s face and I feared the congregation would see the damage we had inflicted on her fingers due to our wanton sexual desires for a schoolgirl.
Only a statue
I knew it was only a statue. And a few scratches to the fingers of a porcelain virgin were hardly going to alter the direction of the universe.
And perhaps the gaudy Santas of department stores and village halls were only there to comfort adults, who could no longer imagine the invisible made visible
And yet all the people blessed themselves and prayed with closed eyes – Hail Mary, full of grace – as if she were of flesh and blood, and kneeling there before them in the straw.
The real Mary, I concluded, must be hiding behind the image. The real Christ must be hidden behind the garish baby in the straw.
The light was hidden in the darkness, as Old-Bishop-Eyebrows said in his sermon.
But my real enlightenment related to Santa.
Perhaps he too was real. Behind the sham of gaudy rituals, in which men with white curly beards and red dressing gowns posed for pictures with frightened infants, there might be a deeper secret; a god of infinite generosity.
And perhaps the gaudy Santas of department stores and village halls were only there to comfort adults, who could no longer imagine the invisible made visible.
But children can see more easily beneath the surface, where God never flinches through the darkness of history’s pogroms or carnage. And even now I love the crib and the laughing plastic Santa that illuminates the front porch, not for what they are, but for what they signify; the gaze and grip of lovely light that forever hides in the darkest hour of winter.