If two years away had left me in need of a reminder that home can be a peculiar place, waking this morning to the sound of air raid sirens would have done the job. Other places left with such equipment would probably not decide that they could fulfil the dual purposes of summoning volunteer firefighters for their shifts, and signalling the imminent end of days, if only because only one of the two is worth getting out of bed for. But then again, the point of the Isle of Man is that it is not quite like anywhere else.
Blocking traffic to and from the airport to make way for the annual festive tractor run is the sort of idiosyncratic decision that makes the island what it is. It goes without saying that farming implements decked out in lights are a relatively recent addition to the list of holiday traditions, added to the rota along with such jolly seasonal pleasantries as the Yuletide gouge, where merry flight booking websites happily inform you that the cost of a ticket a short way into the Irish Sea could probably get you halfway to Beijing.
Others are considerably longer lived. The North of the island faces off against the South at Cammag, a sporting game not unlike hurling. And in common with other places, the news that the White Boys are fighting to the death produces a sensible radius of aversion, but through theatrical taste rather than outright fear. A mummers play featuring fighting knights, a doctor with a bag of mysterious potions, carols, and, regrettably, sword-dancing, scripts exist from 1845 and are still acted out in altered form today.
Boxing day is for hunting the wren. Traditionally, this involved flushing the unfortunate bird out of a bush, chasing it from thicket to thicket, and killing it with stones. The wren would then be suspended in ribbons, carried from house to house, its feathers given away as wards against bad luck and witchcraft, and finally buried in a churchyard. Various backstories for this tradition propose an alliance with protestants, a disguised witch, and a rejection of pagan preferences as the origin of the unhappy business. The modern version dispenses with the hunting but retains the procession, songs, and dancing, in a compromise designed to avoid actively traumatising small children.
Older traditions have largely died out, some less mourned than others; the Mollag bands which would invade open houses and perform folk music until paid to leave are a menace society can do without.
The parts we’re left with are the cultural flotsam remaining after a century of emigration and immigration to and from Britain, the death of the Manx language, and a general unwillingness – to the immense frustration of folklorists – to ever actually write things down where outsiders might read them. Well-meaning attempts by newcomers around 1900 to persuade the population to tell their stories and traditions met with limited success; despite lingering beliefs in bugganes and charmers, any questions were met with ‘some sense of shame, and with a wish to keep them as secret as possible’. This was not helped by an unwillingness in a deeply religious population to set down secular or folkloric frippery, instead recording ‘hymns, scripture, or carvals’.
Carvals – ‘carols’ – were sung in churches on Christmas eve after the service. When the clergyman had left, the congregation stayed behind with candles, and took it in turns to light tapers and sing long compositions until their flame burned out. Their passing is less mysterious; ‘long and often gloomy’ pieces of sixty verses on the terrors of hell do not exactly fit the modern Christmas spirit, even if the pieces of music that remain are beautiful. My sympathies – and I suspect those of the reader – lie with the ‘giddy maidens’ who threw dried peas at the singers until they relented and packed up to the nearest pub.
That, at least, has definitely survived. Prominent among the new traditions is Black-Eye Friday, a movable feast falling on the final Friday before Christmas. As agricultural, building, and other manual workers receive their Christmas bonus, neither rain or cold or fear of covid can prevent their heading to the pub in order to create scenes the Island’s former viking owners would have found highly pleasing.
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