Byrne Emma - Home For Christmas

For my mother, Lena Taylor,
and all mothers who nurtured the sacred seeds of Christmas in the hearts of their children

C hristmas was a warm glow that shone through the cold winter of our school days. Come December, its lights began to twinkle invitingly from a far distant horizon and a sense of anticipation kept us trudging on determinedly in its direction. A bright contrast to the rest of the year, its radiance spread far wider than its allotted twelve days. Like the beacon of a lighthouse, Christmas shone across those bleak winter days drawing us invitingly towards its warm heart.

Down through the years that Christmas glow has never faded for me. It all began in an old-fashioned farmhouse from where we walked daily across the fields to a small two-roomed school looking across the river valley at the Kerry mountains. A Christmas candle was lit there that still glows warmly in my heart.

Going to school was a sentence inflicted on us in childhood during what would otherwise have been days of freedom. Adults constantly assured us that we were swimming through seas of ignorance to reach the desirable shore of being educated, and in our struggle across these seas of ignorance there were three islands of reprieve namely, the school holidays. These kept us going, even when the waters between them were not to our liking. First came the Easter holidays, and, though darkened by the shadows of Lenten fasting, they were redeemed by Easter Sunday, with the return to eating sweets and with the arrival of baby calves and of bluebells beneath the trees in the nearby fort.

Then it was a short span to reach the summer-holiday island, with its long warm days of haymaking and swimming in the river down by the meadows. But when summer ended, there was a long, long, cold stretch to reach the Christmas island, and there were hazardous waters to cross waters of tumbling brown torrents, muddy gaps, dripping trees and soaking wet boots, freezing mornings, frozen fingers and toes with chilblains. The Christmas island seemed almost unreachable as we journeyed across grey frosty fields or through driving rain to arrive, soaking wet with chilled bodies, to sit in an unheated classroom until evening.

In our two-roomed school there were two fires: one in the masters room, which heated the chimney, and the other in the smaller childrens room, where an ancient range coughed out black smoke. On this we warmed our bottles of milk before going out into the play yard, where we ran around, having hunts and cat-and-mouse games to warm our freezing extremities. Before the range had heated itself up properly it was time to go home, and by then the air in the room, fanned by tall rattling windows and holes in the timber floor, had only just come up above zero degrees.

The thought of Christmas approaching was like a warm candle glowing in the distance. Would we survive until then? Sometimes it seemed like a mirage in the distance. Was it real? Would it ever come? The master kept us guessing as to when we would actually get our holidays, and I worried that Christmas would somehow pass us all by and never call to our school. Could we be left marooned in our frozen corner?

Then a miracle happened. A new teacher came to replace one of the regular ones. She was young, bright and beautiful, and like a brilliant butterfly she brought colour and vibrancy into the grey world of winter. We soaked it up like dry sponges. She sang and danced and introduced us to the wonders of the tuning fork, which we viewed as if it were a magic wand. She struck it smartly off the edge of the desk, and it hit a note that was supposed to somehow launch us into a musical air. There was many a false start and crash landing, but eventually we took off.

With the arrival of December, our teacher talked constantly about the approaching Christmas. Then, wonder of wonders, she decided to teach us a Christmas carol. Up to then, carols were confined to the radio or to the church choir on Christmas morning. They were not part of our normal school curriculum, and our singing repertoire was limited to do, re, mi and songs with a nationalistic flavour. This Christmas angel decided that our repertoire should be stretched to include a seasonal item. Christmas would not go unheralded, she proclaimed. We were delighted.

Her choice of carol was inspired: Away in a Manger was perfect for our farming background this carol was speaking our language. That evening I arrived home bearing a grubby copybook into which the words of Away in a Manger had been laboriously copied. My brother Tim, who had a wonderful tenor voice and who was part of the local church choir, was a great help. When he launched into Away in a Manger, we heard the heights to which our teacher was trying to raise us. Assisted by our neighbour Bill, who came every night to help with our lessons, we diligently learnt the words, and they became imprinted into my memory.

The Manger got a fair mangling in our original renditions, but our young teacher was blessed with the power of positive thinking, and slowly but surely we began to sound almost bearable. We knew by her face when we began to achieve notes that were less jarring and eventually grasped a bit of the rhythm. Well, at least most of us did. Our conductor believed in inclusiveness, and in her world there were no such people as non-singers. We were all potential nightingales, she assured us, and refinement would come with practice. And practise we did. She lifted us up into musical spheres previously undreamed of not to mention unattainable.

Every day in school I eagerly looked forward to the singing class. It was the last class of the day, and when you are just ten years old that is a long, long wait. At last singing class arrived. After striking her magic fork off the desk, our teacher stood in front of us waving a conductors baton. As far as we were concerned she might as well have been brandishing a bread knife, but so enthusiastic and joyful was her approach that within minutes she had us all fired up and trying desperately to get the rhythm.

Then, miraculously, one day a breakthrough came. We were actually singing tunefully. The teacher might have been conducting with a baton, but to us she was waving a magic wand that was transforming the stable in our farmyard into a cave on a hillside in Bethlehem, our manger into the manger in Bethlehem.