It had a frothy consistency and sticky at the same time. You couldn’t just shake it off if it landed on your duffel coat, but the coat wouldn’t be ruined either. It was called Jack Frost. You could buy it in bags in Woolworth’s up on High Street Kilkenny at Christmastime. You’d know they had it in, because it would be stuck to the black path outside from young people throwing it over each other. I loved it. I would go so far as to say it had a huge part in making Christmas sparkle for me. It was the contrast. The memory is always about five in the evening. The early dark, the Christmas shopping frenzy, and under all the feet and all the noise, under thrown papers, spilled beer, the sticky everything that makes filth something sparkled like it had come from somewhere else. It was evidence of Christmas magic. The kind that tinsel hadn’t a hope of conjuring. I suppose it was the Christmas decoration that got away, that got to do its own thing.
They didn’t have big street cleaning machines in those days. I remember the rubbish truck with the lifty sides that came down our lane, and Paddens Blanch who always waved and smiled, making his weekly visit an lovely occasion. I suppose street cleaners in those days consisted of a heavy shower after a bit of a sweep. Not like the showers we have these days, no, they weren’t as heavy as they are now. The showers now would probably make shorter work of the black streets and Jack Frost would be disposed of much more efficiently to the drains.
My Dad never decorated the pub for Christmas. Nothing changed in there except the customers drank more, and the floor was stickier than usual. Grubby hands, black nails, orange Guinness rings stuck to stubble, and a stinking kiss for the boss’s daughter.
“I love yer Fader, ya know tha”, giving me a good old squeeze, “Me and yer Fader” fingers crossed, “We’re like tha”.
The crib in the Black Abbey was different to all the other cribs in town, because it had little lights in the sky above the Holy Family. The sky had been painted a beautiful dark blue to show it was night time. Fairy lights were sticking through holes in the canvas, being stars. Angels were singing the Gloria and flying. If those angels were hanging from some form of string, I never saw it, and if the Gloria was some record player in behind the painted sky, it most certainly never reached my consciousness. The combination of the Gloria, the stars and the flying angels had me completely lost in Bethlehem. I went back many times to be lost again to that sparkling sky. Then the short cut home was down a dark lane by the old walls of Kilkenny. Someone had told me about a legless woman who would follow you. To this day I don’t know if I was being told about a drunken woman or a ghostly woman with no actual legs floating along behind you, but I had heard of the Bean Sí, and so I decided, that’s who it was. I knew she only went after the people of certain names, and mine wasn’t one of them so I was safe enough. Still the return from the paradise of holy Bethlehem was a breath held sprint down a crooked path. A bit like the Holy Family flying into Egypt after the joy of him being born and visited by Kings.
I was mad about the holy family, and I especially loved Mary. She was the perfect mother who was always holding her beautiful baby, and never putting him down to cry on his own. Not like the mothers who’d leave their babies stuck in prams outside shops. Babies know when their mother’s are gone, which is why they’d start crying the minute she was gone. I imagined Mary walking around High Street in her lovely blue and white floppy clothes. She’s be showing Baby Jesus the Jack Frost shining up at them. Stars below them as well as above them, and there’d be beautiful light shining all around them.
At school I was the maker of the paper mache donkey for the crib, while Tess Cullen got to make Virgin Mary. She did a lovely job, all blue and white with black lines to show the way her veil fell in womanly shapes over her shoulders. Tess was a great artist. You couldn’t argue with that, and though I put as much artistic talent into making the donkey that was to carry Mary, I knew there was no way a donkey would sparkle, no matter how hard I tried, and I couldn’t help thinking, if I had been the one making Mary, I would have used a little Jack Frost on her veil to show how close she was to stars.
Originally published in The Little Book of Christmas Memories by Liberties Press
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