We have two Christmases: the one we experience and the one we remember

I have a theory that when Irish writers describe Christmas in prose it is in general quite glum but when they evoke it in poetry it is rather magical. And that this distinction might tell us something about the nature of Christmas itself.

In prose the foundational Irish Christmas scene is in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s alter ego Stephen comes home for the holiday from boarding school and is excited about the occasion: “Holly and ivy for him and for Christmas. Lovely... All the people. Welcome home, Stephen! Noises of welcome.”

But it all goes wrong. During the Christmas dinner a vicious row breaks out between his father and one of the guests, Mrs Riordan. It’s about the recently dead Charles Stewart Parnell and the Catholic Church.

The men curse the clerical “sons of bitches” for bringing him down. Mrs Riordan insists that “The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken... and they must be obeyed.” The toxic combination of religion and politics suffocates all merriment. Christmas is not peace and goodwill but a distillation of all the rancour of the rest of the year.

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In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom’s train of thought about Christmas is hardly more cheery: “Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged.”

Perhaps Joyce set a tone. Christmas, in Irish prose, is often the time when the repressed returns. Elizabeth Bowen’s Christmas stories are always creepy. Green Holly, for example, has a ghost doomed to relive the horror of a previous Christmas: “The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood. The figure of the man with the side of his head blown out lay as always, one foot just touching the lowest step of the stairs.”

William Trevor’s story Another Christmas also has a political row at its centre. A previously contented emigrant Irish couple fall out with their English neighbour who used to share their Christmas dinner, over the IRA bombs in Birmingham and Guilford. The wife blames her husband: “And whenever she looked at him she would remember the Christmases of the past. She would feel ashamed of him, and of herself.”

Perhaps the most potent Irish novel of the past few years, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, is very much a Christmas story. Most of the action unfolds in the weeks leading up to the festival, with the coal merchant Furlong’s Christmas rush, the crib in the town square, the buying of presents, the making of the Christmas cake, even telling references to A Christmas Carol. But all of this merely intensifies the horror of Furlong’s confrontation with the reality of the Magdalene laundry in the town and the way it destroys the possibility of familial normality: “The worst was yet to come, he knew.”

Even when the mode is comic, it’s a mad kind of humour. In Anne Enright’s The Green Road, there’s a hysterical (in both senses) description of Constance’s manic Christmas grocery shop, the “horrors of the vegetable section”, the piling of the trolley with stuff that will never be eaten, the terror of forgetting something: “She was on the road home before she remembered potatoes, thought about pulling over to the side of the road and digging some out of a field, imagined herself with her hands in the earth, scrabbling around for a few spuds. Lifting her head to howl.”

Yet Irish poets seem to imagine it all differently. There are exceptions – Paul Durcan’s wonderful long poem Christmas Day is a painful (though very funny) anatomy of the way Christmas really feels for people who are excluded from its family rituals: “Christmas is the Feast of Saint Loneliness”.

But the poetic equivalent of Joyce’s disastrous Christmas dinner as a touchstone for later writers is Patrick Kavanagh’s A Christmas Childhood: “My child poet picked out the letters/ On the grey stone,/ In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,/ The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.”

Máire Mhac an tSaoi, in Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s lovely translation of Christmas Eve, brings the Bible home to Ireland: “Kindle the fire and go to your slumber,/ Jesus will lie in this household tonight.” Michael Longley’s Christmas Tree has the ageing poet becoming (almost) a Virgin Mary as he cradles his newborn grandson in his arms: “Your forefinger twitches inside its mitten./ Do you feel at home in my aching crook?”

In prose, politics intrude to ruin Christmas; in poetry Christmas can withstand politics. Mairtín Ó Direáin, in the bleak war-torn Christmas of 1942, invites the Virgin and child to seek refuge – in Peter Sirr’s translation – on a “distant island in the western sea”.

In An Ulster Twilight Seamus Heaney reanimates a childhood memory in which his belief in Santa Claus is almost ruined when he realises that the toy battleship he’s to get for Christmas is being made by the local carpenter. He also remembers that the carpenter’s father is a member of the sectarian B-Specials. But instead of wrecking the magic of Christmas, the moment is one of grace.

Why this difference? I think it’s because prose typically deals in the raw stuff of lived experience, while poetry is strained through memory. Experience has to include the family rows and the sorrows of the outside world and manic shopping. Memory can filter these things out.

And often we have two Christmases: the one we experience and the one we remember. On St Stephen’s Day, when it’s all still fresh, we wonder what it was all for, why we put ourselves through it. We are all too aware that it can be fraught and frantic. But we also know that we put ourselves through it in order to keep memory alive, to re-enact childhoods, not necessarily as they were but as we want them to have been. We live Christmas in prose, we recall it in poetry.