Yesterday, I failed to get up from the kitchen table to face the Christmas shops, though I’d remembered the lessons from last year – dress for summer, don’t panic. Take regular refuge in the book shops. Instead, I got lost listening to Lyric FM. And when Vivaldi’s Winter came on, the kitchen suddenly became too warm to leave. The music settled on me, the way I always find that winter eventually settles on me, with a sort of patience that I don’t think any other season bears. I admit to loving winter.
Inevitably, given the time of year, the music, the refuge one always finds in one’s own kitchen, over the course of the afternoon, my childhood Christmases began to come back to me, my mother in particular, coming to me most vividly. I don’t remember her spending much time in the shops, but I do remember her working for weeks, late into the night, in preparation.
And when the big day came, I’d find myself perplexed by my mother’s annual habit of falling asleep in the latter part of the afternoon of Christmas day. More accurately, she seemed to be out for the count, and my aunt would gaze at her affectionately. I remember my disappointment that my mother would miss the best scene in Oliver. I’d feel uncomfortably lonely on her behalf, even guilty. Wasn’t she enjoying Christmas?
Of course, having raised a family, I understand now that she was suffering from exhaustion; the heavy physical labour she had endured in the weeks leading to Christmas had almost put her off her feet.
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What sticks in my mind most is the memory of her making puddings; the heavy, dried fruit mixture sitting idle in a large basin for hours, when she must have become too exhausted. Finally, concerned that the mixture had sat too long, she would open the bottles of stout, leaving the dregs for us to finish as we competed to see whose grimace could best communicate the bitterness.
For the next two days, the kitchen windows steamed up and condensation streamed down the cupboard doors. The lino in the kitchen provided us a skating rink – what a help that must have been to our poor mother! But she never said anything.
Making puddings, cake, preparing a feast, was seasonal work, an intensification of the labour of housework that was all year round and relentless. It was a special duty, so vital that it was discussed at length on Gay Byrne’s morning radio show from at least November. But there were breakthrough and much discussed moments, such as the discovery by the woman who phoned in to report the success and reduction in time and labour of oven-cooking Christmas puddings.
My mother never resorted to it because she regarded it as sort of cheating and expressed concerns about the fruit drying out too much. Ideally, puddings should be made months in advance, almost all callers to the Gay Byrne show agreed, so that the closer to Christmas the days drew, the more my mother felt she was failing.
The only one capable of consolation was my unmarried aunt who seemed to me to have an alternative perspective on household labour, expressed through her absolute refusal to undertake any. Instead, she would sit for hours in a kitchen chair, telling tales of her job in Green Shield stamps, distracting my mother from her increasingly despondent state, “You’re too petite for such heavy work. Don’t mind Mrs C – fewer children,” she’d console, “and all girls, so little helpers ready to hand.”
But my mother was not to be consoled, even if she did have seven children, and Mrs C next door, only four. I suspect my mother felt as though she would never measure up to expectations that were regarded as important enough to be broadcast even on the radio. Eventually, she was persuaded by my aunt’s sage, ‘spinster’ advice, and they would each partake of a glass of stout, and then another, until they were charmingly tipsy, as they observed each one of us children pass through the kitchen to construct for ourselves a sugar sandwich, pausing momentarily to take a turn of stirring the weighty pudding mixture in the basin.
When the basin was finally emptied, much to my fascination, my mother would soak my aunt’s feet in it, in an exotic blend of stout, Epsom salts and warm water.
Women’s labour at Christmas was hard labour. My mother would later describe it as “a labour of love” and it was surely that. But as a child, it seemed to me competitive; easy to fail in, and I worried for my mother, even fibbing to the girls in my class that she had everything finished. I must have thought it necessary to protect her reputation.
Now though, women’s lives are different; the notion that women should undertake such labour in the midst of all the other things we do, is, I hope, absurd. Housewife of the Year competitions seem like something from another age; there’s a preposterousness to the whole concept. Yet, I’m worried: that the labour has just mutated; that we have transitioned from housewife of the year to the supermom, that perpetually rushed, under pressure figure who has become all things: financial provider, cook, housekeeper, mother, menopause warrioress, carer for elderly relatives.
My mother always reminded us that Christmas closed on January 6th, which was, she said, Women’s Christmas; the children likely by then returned to school, the men most certainly returned to work. In my mother’s childhood home, they had always cooked another turkey, and other than that, had used up all the leftovers, to reduce the labour associated with such feasting, so that women could finally rest.
My mother never really celebrated it, though. I think she just couldn’t face any more Christmas, and worst of all, my delightful unmarried aunt, her gentle, life-long companion, had had to return to work with the men.
So, this year, though I still haven’t even started my Christmas shopping, I am already determined to celebrate Women’s Christmas. With my daughters and my sister, I will sit in their memory, to honour those women who shaped me. I’m glad that I didn’t brave the shops, because there’s a lot that can happen in a kitchen this time of year, when there’s a radio playing in the background.
Anna Fitzgerald’s debut novel Girl in the Making won the John McGahern Book Prize, chosen by Colm Tóibín.
