In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” friends and relatives gather at a Dublin townhouse for a yearly Christmas dance at the home of the elderly Morkan sisters, Julia and Kate. The guests dance to piano waltzes played by the Morkans’ niece Mary Jane, who like her aunts is a music teacher. Freddy Malins shows up not as drunk as expected. The conversation includes opera and a local monastery where the monks sleep in coffins. The guests are served goose and ham, punch and steamed pudding while the elderly spinsters fret over their welfare. Every year, Gabriel Conroy, nephew of the Morkan sisters, gives a toast at the close of the meal.

Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier.

He begins his oration, during which he extolls the virtues of hospitality:

“I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as its hospitality.”

It’s an interesting point. Hospitality needs conscious protection, like natural beauty or a language that can be inundated by a foreign tongue.

“Here we are gathered together for a brief moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine. We are met here as friends, in the spirit of good fellowship, as colleagues also to a certain extent, in the true spirit of camaraderie, and as the guests of – what shall I call them – the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world.”

At the close of his speech, all the guests rise and, with glass in hand, they face the three hostesses and sing:

For they are jolly gay fellows,
For they are jolly gay fellows,
For they are jolly gay fellows,
Which nobody can deny.

With this, “Aunt Kate [made] frank use of her handkerchief and even Aunt Julia seemed moved.”

I highly recommend this story if you are ever out of the Christmas loop. I have the flu today and cannot go to our annual Christmas meal at my parents, who are cut from the same mold as the Morkan sisters. They maintain the fragile tradition of Irish hospitality at its best.

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