Fintan O’Toole: ‘When I close my eyes and think of Christmas . . .’

When I close my eyes and think of Christmas, I see a fat man in a top hat with a whip. I see lurid stripes of red and yellow. This is not delirium tremens. It is the only Christmas present I can remember from childhood.

It is what floats back into memory from the year my mother knitted us a circus.

I know there were other Christmases and other presents. There was a tricycle once but the only thing I remember about it is getting in trouble later when I swapped it for a water pistol. It’s the brutal thing about children. They say they want things and you slave and save and you buy them. In return, you get the hysteria and the running around and the novelty wearing off around noon and the kids going back to what they were playing with the day before. And they forget the whole thing.

But I don’t forget the knitted circus. There was the fat ringmaster in his scarlet coat. His flesh seemed pudgy and pale. His black top hat with yellow ribbon perfectly matched his black boots with yellow tops and the yellow bib that set off his black beard.

Shaggy mane

There was a lion whose ears stuck up between the strands of deep brown wool that made his shaggy mane, above big eyes of dark felt and a snubby black nose. There was a giraffe, his neck as long as his legs, his jagged, irregular spots embroidered in black outlines. There was a brown elephant with yellow and red backcloth and head piece, buttons for eyes and white felt tusks.

A seal with fluffy whiskers balanced a red-and-white ball on his nose. The clown had a conical hat, red ruffs at the end of his sleeves and round his neck and a shock of golden hair. A lady usher wore a blue bellboy-type outfit with a gold stripe down her trousers and a gold band around her pillbox hat.

There were two little white dogs with black patches on one ear and one eye. And there was a big yellow circus ring with red tent poles and a high box for the lion to sit on.

The circus was for five of us – four really because the new baby was too little to care very much.

The only thing that seemed at all odd to us was that Santa hadn’t put it in a box. It was just wrapped up in paper. But we didn’t mind. It never dawned on us that the circus was home-made, and I don’t think we even registered that it was made of wool.

It simply could not have been produced by the same hands, and with the same material, that created itchy jumpers and shameful scarves. It was entirely lovely and, to us, entirely exclusive. Other kids on the street and in school had boring answers to the question: “What did you get for Christmas?” A doll. A ball. Football boots. Roller skates. We got a whole circus.

Despair

It was not until many years later that I realised that the circus was actually made of despair. It had been a hard year, with a new baby coming not long after his predecessor had died in infancy. Then there had been a very long strike – 10 or 12 weeks, I think – that kept my father out of work and devoured all the savings that my mother had for Christmas.

She realised in the dark of November that there would be no money for presents. Even then, when Ireland had not yet been drenched by the full tide of consumerism, this was shameful.

It evoked that dread that parents hate to name – the terror of appearing a failure in the eyes of your kids. It was rock bottom.

And then she saw a book of knitting patterns for a stuffed woollen circus. She remembered later that she had her own evening pattern. She would get us up to bed. My grandfather would go off to the pub. My father would still be at work, doing overtime to recoup his lost earnings.

She would wash out our socks and underwear for the next day and hang them in front of the fire. And then she would sit down and knit a giraffe’s tail or a red-and-white ball for a seal’s nose. I like to think that the anxiety in her fingers unwound itself little by little as the needles clicked and the yarn looped round itself and these daft creatures began to take their jolly shapes.

Afraid

Still, when it came to it, when she wrapped the circus and put it under the tree, she was afraid. Afraid that we would see through the cheapness of it all, the remnants of wool, the scraps of felt, the absence of anything that reeked of shops and money.

She need not have been – it reeked instead of sawdust and animal sweat, of colour and fantasy. And somehow, though we knew nothing of where it came from, what lodged it unforgettably in our memories was not just the thrill of the circus but the movement of the hands that made it.