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  • Christmas Greetings from Seamus Heaney
  • Ashby Bland Crowder

In 1971, Seamus Heaney had just returned to Belfast after a year at the University of California, Berkeley. On his return he was shocked, for he and his family found themselves living in a city of killings, reprisals, vigilantism, explosions, blaring sirens, roadblocks, and boarded-up windows. “Everywhere soldiers with cocked guns are watching you,” and at night “jeeps and armoured cars groan past without lights,” Heaney remarks in the “Christmas, 1971” section of the essay “Belfast.” At Christmas, decorations were scant. “There are hardly any fairy lights, or Christmas trees,” he wrote, “and in many cases there will be no Christmas cards.”1 Escalated tensions led to bombings of pubs and office blocks, and the killing by British soldiers of thirteen unarmed civilians on January 30, 1972. Heaney decided that Belfast was “not a good place to bring up children.”2 By August, the Heaney family had moved to Glanmore Cottage, County Wicklow. In 1976 the family settled in Dublin, near Sandymount Strand.

Starting in this happy year, 1976, Seamus and Marie Heaney began sending Christmas cards, a practice that they maintained through the years, though the press of obligations sometimes led to gaps. The cards were privately printed by Peter Fallon at the Gallery Press. Heaney wrote a poem for each card. The first, “Catherine’s Poem,” emphasizing Christmas as a family affair, came from a conversation that Heaney had with his three-year-old daughter:

“Aren’t poems like your toys, Daddy?”   Catherine said, “And didn’t you and mammy make me And God made the thread?”3 [End Page 34]

Heaney was of course not the only poet to have written poems especially for Christmas cards. It has been fairly usual for poets to send Christmas-card poems at least once in their lives. Kevin Crossley-Holland and Lawrence Sail have produced a little book containing Christmas-card poems by eighty-eight poets, among them Rowan Williams, Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, and Elizabeth Bewick (John Mole and Seamus Heaney are the only poets represented twice in this slim volume). There is no indication of the extent to which these poets made the writing of a Christmas poem a regular yearly practice, apart from Heaney.4

Some American poets also followed the practice. Robert Frost, from 1935 to 1962, produced a number of seasonal cards featuring his poems, with the printer Joseph Blumenthal, and Frost sent these cards to his friends. There is a big “however” to be added here: the cards were, in fact, a money-making affair for Frost, as they were also sold for the general public to send to their friends.5 Reynolds Price, by contrast, sent out his poems with “Holiday Greetings and Best Wishes for the Coming Year,” the message “None are for sale” clearly printed on the card’s back.

There was no commercial dimension to the Heaneys’ Christmas-card tradition. From 1976 on, Heaney made the cards a gift to his friends, usually with a poem not yet published. Often they were so new and fresh that Heaney would revise them significantly before they appeared in his next volume. When the Heaneys began, they sent seventy-five cards; by 1996, the number of recipients had grown to 175, and in 2007, three-hundred. These Christmas poems must have been cherished by most recipients, though it is sad to see some of them on the web sites of booksellers going for hundreds of pounds sterling, perhaps put up for sale by distant surviving relatives of the original recipients.

Not all of Heaney’s poems for Christmas cards have a specifically Christmas subject, but those that do naturally bring to mind those of Patrick Kavanagh, even if the kind of strong echoes clearly detectable from his The Great Hunger found in Heaney’s “At a Potato Digging” are absent. In some ways Heaney follows Kavanagh’s general impulses, and in other ways he ventures far beyond his forebear. Heaney harbors an inclination to stroke the past, as Kavanagh does; and like Kavanagh’s, Heaney’s poems are not about Christmas morning: they are about “Advent” or “Christmas Eve Remembered” (Kavanagh...

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