Night Santa faced an explosive Gunn
This farmer, you see, feloniously assaulted and battered and ambushed poor old Santa Claus on at least five or six Yuletides when times were hard, his family of seven sons and daughters all young and rising, and when many of us Irish in that time and place did things differently to now.
I would not have told ye before that the surname of the farmer who ambushed poor Santa was Gunn, though in all fairness, he did not deploy his shotgun in any of the annual ambushes. That weapon, though, almost came to be used one Christmas by somebody else — but we will come to that shortly.
This unique character, whom I met at a wedding years later, had his farm in that tangle of Ulster borderlands where I was raised. Then, and now too, though thankfully to a lesser degree, almost all facets of life and living were somehow connected to religion and politics of the troubled Ulster pattern, and so, even the youngest of the children gathered in that Catholic kitchen in high excitement every Christmas Eve would have been keenly aware of the import of what their serious-faced daddy spoke to them, just after darkness began to fall over the borderlands.
Lads and lassies, he would say, in sombre tones, there is no way at all that Santa Claus is going to come down our chimney tonight. I hate to say it, and your mammy is brokenhearted about it, but the facts are that ye behaved very badly all year, every one of you, and so Santa and Rudolph and the sleigh will pass us by this year at high speed, and keep on going down to the fine Protestant family down the road, those two perfectly behaved daughters, and the strapping son Willie that helps his parents on the farm every evening without fail, fair play to him, and they will get all, and ye will get nothing, because ye don’t deserve anything.
And then he would list all the misdeeds of his children, all through the year. Maggie had not helped her mother to feed the calves. Johnny left the main gate to the road open twice, and the cattle strayed, and the best bullock was killed by the milk lorry, below at the crossroads.
James mitched from school, and brought shame to the whole family. Sarah tried to pick a row with the two fine peaceful Protestant girls before the Twelfth of July parade, and they had to run home in tears to their lovely mother. And Danny refused to take the bitter medicine he was supposed to take twice daily, to help him recover from the rheumatic fever that forced him into a wheelchair since he was six years old. The father sadly listed every family crime, that would surely send Santa speeding past the house without stopping.
And all the young heads hung low around that big open fire, that I sat at myself several times later. Total dejection all round. And it was then, every year, that the big strong mammy played her part in the drama. She would pour a brimming jigger of whiskey for the father, and attack him roundly, there and then.
The children had not been that bold at all, she would say, but the biggest question of all was whether she had married a man or a mouse.
Was the daddy going to sit up in the corner like a little gray mouse, and let the Santa pass by without a challenge, on his way to giving all the gifts to the Protestants?
Take off your coat, she would command, and down that dram and go out and be a man. And she would throw open the front door, and out he would go, rolling up his sleeves as he went.
Silence then, for long minutes, the children listening intently and then, from the direction of the roadside hayshed, the sounds of a truly dreadful conflict. They could hear the sounds of bodies banging against the corrugated iron flanks of the shed, their dog barking like a maniac, what sounded like the grunts of men locked in physical combat, and, every year without fail, their father shouting something like, “Begod Claus, you hairy hoor you, I dare you to pass us out”.
And more fighting sounds, and scuffles, and even worse language. And finally, a dreadfully foreboding silence hanging heavy over the borderlands. Maybe daddy was stone dead out in the yard.
It was at this point, one Christmas, that the mammy caught a weeping Danny heading out the back door in his wheelchair with the shotgun, to save his father. The pure truth, yet again.
The daddy would always survive the battle, of course, but when he eventually came in, dragging a big jute sack behind him, he was always in a dreadful state — his clothes in tatters, his face smeared with dung and dirt, his tie lost somewhere outside on the battlefield beside the byre. Mammy would have to fortify him with another whiskey.
And the children found a gift for everybody in the sack, and the daddy would always beg them to behave better in the New Year, because Claus was one woeful tough old hoor, and he might not be ever able to best him again.
Will any of our children have a more excitingly memorable Christmas this year? I rather doubt it.
