Trials and tribulations of the winter season

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Just in case it might have passed you by, we have slipped into the season of Advent since Sunday last and we should all be in a mildly penitential state in the run-up to the Christmas season.

There has always been a strong tradition across the religious rainbow that before there’s to be any great feasting and supping, a period of penance and want must be endured.

Ramadan in the Muslim world involves a month of really serious sacrifice with no food consumption allowed during the daylight hours while in the Christian faiths, the period of Lenten sacrifice is ingrained in most of our minds.

The word Advent takes in a root from the Latin word of Adventus which means ‘coming’ and it always begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, which has to fall between November 27 and December 3.

This year, we are moving very gently into the period of Mid-Winter, the transition being made a lot more tolerable by our dry period of weather and days of low November sunshine.

Coming up to the end of November last year, we had endured a nasty period of heavy rainfall with over 2016mms. (well over 8 inches) at the Met. Éireann station in Athenry, setting up December to deliver the coup de grace with its series of storm deluges.

This year, we are likely to have less than one third of that rainfall through the month of November, which will help to keep most of us in a relatively benign mood as we prepared for the celebration of one of the two great Christian feasts of the year.

The build-up to the season of goodwill already seems to have started in earnest over the past fortnight and unless memory is playing tricks with me, I remember one of Galway city’s big city centre shops having the fir trees in place before October’s end.

Years back the traditional start to Christmas didn’t even coincide with the start of Advent, but rather the eighth day of December, when the feast of the Immaculate Conception was celebrated.

It is the season of the big spend – the greatest of the year – and it’s not surprising that shops and retailers try to get us in the buying mood as early as possible. Most of the big bills of the retailers – well the small ones anyway – are paid from the largesse of the Christmas season.

Back the years, there was never too much attention paid in country households to periods of penitence before Christmas, although in reality, money was often ‘spared’ and left aside for the seasonal spend from mid-December onwards.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.