Given the news last night that effectively increases the restrictions of meeting and movement over this Christmas period, many of you will feel well and truly disheartened this morning as you try to get your head around the last-minute change of plans again, and what it means for you personally.
My dearly departed mother used to tell me, “Anyone can be happy, Billy, when everything in the garden is rosy!” She was bang on. All fair-weather gardeners may get to look at the flowers and eat the vegetables, but the fact that they grow at all has absolutely nothing to do with their horticultural contribution, and everything to do with nature.
The unwelcome situation that the British nation finds itself in this morning is something that nobody can smile about, but please, don’t give up smiling altogether. It is a senseless exercise (and some might argue a reckless one) to abandon hope and relinquish one’s capacity to remain rational and calm in the storm, for to do so is merely to invite further calamity. Like the good gardener who will not abandon their allotment during inclement weather, like the shepherd who refuses to search for stray flock or the farmer who fights to bring in the crop, we remain the captains of our own ship and the masters of our own fate; however perilous the seas we sail!
So, let me state here and now, nobody is cancelling my Christmas. Christ will still come into my life, whatever the weather. We may be in a place that we would rather not be this Christmas Day, but life is very much a lottery for all of us; ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it!’ So do not relinquish your right to be happy this Christmas in whatever way you can be. In the final analysis, even the most pessimistic among you have to admit that however unsatisfactory a situation every person finds themselves in this morning, it is still better than not being alive. So, stiffen your resolve, stand up straight, pick up that spade and start digging yourselves out of that hole of desperation where no life can thrive.
The song for my morning post today is ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’. This festive song was recorded by Welsh singer-songwriter Shakin’ Stevens in November 1985 and was the Christmas Number 1 song for that year. Ever since it has been included in many top-selling Christmas collections and received frequent airplay every Christmas.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
‘Merry Christmas’ is a seasonal expression that is spoken by everyone to each other every Christmas. As a rule, the sentiment expresses a genuine wish that the person being greeted enjoys themselves this Christmas. Often, however, the greeter of this seasonal welcome will not be fully aware of the precise circumstances of the person being greeted; sometimes making the wishing of ‘Merry Christmas’ itself, words that are too difficult to hear or take on board positively for some recipients of them.
The person being greeted may have just received their redundancy notice from their employer and hasn’t yet told their wife and children of the sad news. Or they may have received a ‘Final Warning’ threatening ‘cut off’ for fuel arrears, or have been served with divorce papers, or been told that they have a terminal illness and might not see another Christmas. They may have incurred massive debts and face house eviction in the New Year, or be harbouring some secret that will change their life like a single woman who finds herself pregnant by a past boyfriend who is no longer on the scene, or perhaps a married person who has fallen in love with someone else and has decided to tell their spouse and end their marriage in the New Year.
Knock on any door down any street in any town this Christmas, and within that household, you will most likely find some unwelcome personal circumstances of one of its members. All families have its own perennial problems and unsatisfactory situations they need to cope with and manage ‘behind closed doors’. This year, with the pandemic virus ripping large, the customary problems to be found in many households will be intensified and worsened by unnecessary illness and death in some instances either before Christmas Day or in the New Year because of Christmas Day mixing, and enjoying our Christmas will be much harder to achieve.
I have always loved Christmas and celebrated this season of December; not only because of its religious significance in my life, but because Christmas happiness is a large part of my family upbringing and heritage. Although I was the oldest child of seven children born to Irish parents who migrated to West Yorkshire in 1945, my dear mother would never let Christmas pass us by without making a song and dance about it. Mum attended ‘Midnight Mass’ every year with any of her children who could walk the three miles journey from Windybank Estate to Cleckheaton Catholic Church and back. Every year, my mother would look around the church congregation to see if she could spot her oldest brother, Willie, at Midnight Mass.
Uncle Willie lived alone in the house of his deceased parents in Portlaw, County Waterford in Ireland. This was my maternal grandparent’s home, in whose front room, I was born on November 10th, 1942. Uncle Willie would exchange letters weekly with my mother, and every December he would write to my mother saying that if she looked for him at the Midnight Mass in Cleckheaton, she might spot him at the back of the church.
Uncle Willie had been 'an alcoholic' as long as I had known him, as well as being a man who couldn’t utter one sentence without three ‘fakes’ in them (the Irish pronunciation for its English swear-word equivalent of fu..). While my mother dearly hoped that her brother Willie would show up, a large part of her wished he’d wait outside the church if he did, instead of entering it eating fish and chips and ‘effin’ and ‘blinding’ during the crowded service, besides proudly making himself known to all and sundry as being my mum’s brother.
I will always recall one year when Uncle Willie was at Midnight Mass in Cleckheaton, having caught the ferry across to England at the last moment to surprise us all. Mum naturally asked him to stay with us for Christmas (adding that I would be willing to sleep in the same bed with my two sisters during his visit). I was 11 years old at the time and although I loved my sisters, I didn’t want to share a double bed with them and their rude awakenings.
Uncle Willie did not come across to England from Ireland every year he promised to, but on the two occasions during my childhood when he did, he would remain with us for months on end, and only return to his house in Ireland after he had well and truly outstayed his welcome by tarnishing the Forde family name of which my father prided himself.
During his two-month stay with us, Uncle Willie would remain drunk for the most part. My father never drank a drop of alcohol, and yet, because Willie was my mother’s brother, he put up with him ‘because he was family’. After that first year when Willie had crossed the Irish Sea to spend Christmas and see his oldest sister and her family, although we continued to look for his presence at Midnight Mass in Cleckheaton every year that followed, mum was both sad yet somewhat relieved when she didn’t find him there.
I am pleased to say that for almost five years prior to his death in Portlaw, Ireland, Uncle Willie broke his lifelong addiction to alcohol and stopped drinking altogether. He also stopped a lifetime’s tobacco addiction and started going for daily walks. Paradoxically, it was only when he was on the verge of dying that he started to look after his health a bit better. He died in sobriety and was buried a teetotal man in the grounds of the church where I’d been baptised as an infant. All my mother’s seven children and their partners attended his Irish funeral. The Irish need little excuse to make a big occasion out of every family event, especially if can be turned into a celebration of life. We all had a good few drinks to celebrate Uncle Willie’s life on earth.
Uncle Willie had made himself a bit of a recluse during his final few years on earth with the other Portlaw villagers, and because he housed so many cats as his companions, many of the villagers considered him to be a bit of an odd ball. Few villagers would ever knock on his door, and most would always cross the street when they saw him walking towards them, believing him to be unpredictable in his general response.
As my deceased mother’s seven children and their partners travelled into Portlaw by car on the day of Uncle Willie’s funeral, we approached the bridge on the last stage of the journey and looked up the steep hill towards ‘St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church’ to see if anyone from the village was walking up to attend Uncle Willie’s funeral. There wasn’t a soul in sight, and our hearts sank with the sad thought that not one of his Portlaw neighbours had seen fit to attend his burial service. As we turned the corner in our cars to go up the hill towards the church (just like a crowd scene out of the film ‘The Quiet Man’), over 100 villagers emerged from the bottom of the village and crossed the Portlaw bridge in respectful silence to walk up the steep hill to the church where they said their final farewells to Uncle Willie. Though the sight of such a large crowd to attend the burial service of Uncle Willie heartened the Forde family and brought immediate tears to our eyes, none of us was ignorant enough of Irish ways not to realise that all the Irish hate to waste the opportunity of a good get together in the pub after a funeral, especially when the visiting Forde family from England was standing the rounds!
Whatever one has to say about the Irish, never let it be said that they don’t look after their own; whether they be oddballs, drunks, or the most eccentric of individuals on God’s planet like dear Uncle Willie was!
My mother brought the Christmas spirit into our family home from my childhood years and kept it there until she died at the early age of 64 years. Every Christmas Eve, she would join all her grown-up children and their partners at some pub gathering and make merry until she was literally unable to drink another free rum and black currant juice or tell another one of her ‘tall tales’ about Ireland, and the interesting characters she grew up with. We all loved listening to the telling and retelling of my mother’s tales about her years of growing up into the most attractive woman ever to walk the streets of Portlaw; not forgetting all of the men she could have chosen to marry (especially those handsome fellows who finished up rich and owning their own farms or factories) instead of the one she did (my soccer-playing father). While dad neither danced nor drank, mum would dance and drink his portion gladly in his absence from family gatherings.
While my mother could tell the tallest of stories, she was never small on honesty whenever she expressed her true emotions with us. Never a day passed when she didn’t tell all her children that she loved us. When mum looked us in the eye and said she loved us, we knew she did, and whenever mum said ‘Merry Christmas’ to anyone, they also knew that she truly meant it. I don’t know what she would have thought about Christmas 2020, but I do know that she would have met and greeted it with as much hope and positivism as she possessed, and no sooner than it had passed, she would have been positively looking forward to next Christmas!
Sheila and I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Love and peace. Bill and Sheila xxx