At this time of year you’ve probably had it with festive planners, Christmas countdowns and those magazine features about what presents to buy — as if picking presents, rather than paying for them, were the problem. So when I say that the Christmas season is actually too short, and that we should round it off with a second, mini-Christmas, you may get a bit restive. But bear with me.
Let’s get onto the second idea first, viz, the mini Christmas. In Ireland, that’s actually what it’s called, the Nollaig Beag or Nollaig na mBan — the Little Christmas, or the woman’s Christmas. That’s the name for the Epiphany in the west of Ireland and the gist of it, as you’ll have gathered, is that it was a day for the women. They would go round to each other’s houses and take tea and cake, and talk. ‘It was their day, the women’s day,’ one old woman in Limerick told me. ‘In later years they would get together and go out for a meal, but back then it’d be in the houses.’
It was the women’s day off, after a season — hell, a year — of waiting on everyone else. A more extreme version of the thing had the menfolk doing the cooking on the day, but that wasn’t, I fancy, widespread. Brid Mahon, in her Land of Milk & Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food & Drink, gives an account of some of the dainties on offer: ‘thinly cut sandwiches, scones, gingerbread, apple cakes, sponge cakes decorated with swirls of icing, plum cake, brown bread, soda bread, pats of freshly made butter, bowls of cream, dishes of jam and the best quality tea’. Count me in! Actually, while tea and cake was the norm, you’d sometimes get wine, justified perhaps by the Irish proverb that ‘on the feast of the Three Kings, the water turns to wine’.
And that night you’d have candles lit in the windows: 12 of them in some parts. According to Kevin Danaher’s classic text, The Year in Ireland: Irish Calendar Customs, that was ‘in memory of our saviour and his apostles, lights of the world’, or the lit candles represented the family or those gathered, and as the candles died out ‘it indicated the order in which they would die’.
Don’t try that at home.
In recent years in Ireland there’s been a bit of a resuscitation of the custom, which was always a rural thing, largely confined to the Irish-speaking areas of Cork and Kerry. It’s now an opportunity for well-to-do urban women to meet up and drink in a hotel or a pub — actually it’s turning into a self-conscious kind of Celtic version of International Women’s Day. I know, the notion of contemporary Irishwomen needing an excuse to drink or take time out for themselves is so redolent of a vanished era, it could make you cry, but for older women, the kind who don’t do brunch every Saturday, it’s a thank-you for doing the work for the rest of the season. And that’s where I think the tradition could usefully be resuscitated. The Twelfth Day of Christmas could be a day for spoiling the women who do most of the work over Christmas — and not just in Ireland — as opposed to the last date for putting the trees out.
Nollaig na mBan is, when you think of it, a feminised version of the Feast of Fools, and I’m not being rude here. That’s one of the things that the Epiphany was called in the Middle Ages, pretty well in the spirit of the Roman Saturnalia. The natural order of things was inverted — hence, the election of a Boy Bishop in English cathedrals — and you’d get children ruling for the night, as indeed you did on the feast of St Nicholas, Santa proper, on 6 December. It’s a short step from the Three Kings worshipping the baby in the stable to up-ending normal social conventions, and having men waiting on women, or at least women waiting on each other.
This sort of thing doesn’t have the same resonance now, when men are domesticated, mothers work outside the home and children rule most roosts — the feast of Misrule is pretty well business as usual chez McDonagh. But it’s a pleasant custom: all the benefits of Mother’s Day without the steely commercialism. In fact, anything that keeps Christmas going for the full season is worth it, in my book.
And that brings me back to the first point, which is that Christmas doesn’t last long enough, at least not from its proper starting point. As practised by most Brits, Christmas starts in November with the office party season and carries on until Boxing Day, only to be resuscitated briefly on New Year’s Eve with the next day off, then back to business as usual, when everyone starts their detox. Virtually the only concession to the feast of the Three Kings is that French patisseries lay on galettes des Rois, or the almond tart with a bean inside and a crown on top. But by and large, most people just take down the decorations.
Most of the things we associate with Christmas are fairly modern — though holly and ivy, you’ll be glad to know, were there from the start. Sending Christmas cards is a 19th-century tradition — and the annual row about whether they should feature robins or nativity scenes is weirdly at odds with the fact that the original ones featured puddings, holly, Christmas tree, Christmas dinners. Giving Christmas presents on 25 December rather than New Year’s Day is a relatively recent invention: Queen Victoria was still giving New Year presents in 1900. Christmas trees are a Victorian import. Turkeys are a modern element of the feast. Which doesn’t stop people getting terrifically worked up when these hallowed customs are compromised.
But the one thing that really is a Christmas tradition is its duration, which was settled in the 6th century. If we want an old-fashioned Christmas, we’ll just have to spread the party season right up to 6 January. And if it ends up with the women taking the day off for Little Christmas, that sounds pretty good to me.