Twelve Candles: Superstition and Story in South County Galway

Every year, on the night of the 5^th of January, extended family gather in my grandmother’s sitting room, in high spirits despite the waning festive season and the long, dark weeks to get through before St Patrick’s Day. On the floor, we place an old fire guard, face down – one of those flat, flimsy, brass-plated ones. On its exposed back we spread skinny, stubby candles, each fixed to the board beneath it with wax. The name of a family member is scribbled on the board at the base of every candle. The candles are lit, and burn down, and the family member whose name is written under the first candle to go out will be the next to die. This ritual called the Twelve Candles, and it’s been a feature of our Christmases for as long as I can remember.

We treat this macabre carry-on with mighty levity, adding even the names of babies and elderly family members to the board, teaming up parents and offspring so we don’t run out of candles (only my grandmother is guaranteed one to herself). The candles vary in burn-down speed. Some spread into pools of wax, some remain faithfully candle-shaped. When they reach the board, some of the flames go out promptly; some collapse into their pools and burn instead from there, using up the melted wax; some even burn into the board itself. The fun is in how you can’t predict how each candle will behave. A wobbly flame can be resurrected. A strong, slow burn can go out in an instant. The rigmarole is soundtracked with gasps and hooting, and the winner – or loser, considering they’re next to shuffle off the mortal coil – rolls their eyes and quips back at the many and varied taunts. Haha! You’re going to die!

Every year we do this … well, every year so far. In 2026, it’s become difficult to continue the tradition. It’s hard to find the right candles. You want them short and slim enough to have a burning time of about an hour: bigger than birthday cake candles, but smaller than church candles. This is an odd size and no one really stocks it anymore. There is an old-fashioned general merchant in our small south County Galway town, and though they’ve long been a solid supplier of appropriate candles, they’re struggling to source them these days. A neighbour may swing by with a paper bag of candles that are almost, but not quite right. My grandmother wonders what’s going on at all? What’s going on that we can’t get the right candles for the Twelve Candles?

It was a miracle that we could get these candles in the first place. This is folklore without much of a footprint. Even friends from the same town have never heard of the Twelve Candles. A cousin’s aunt in Manchester performs the ritual, but she’s the sister of my cousin’s dad, who’s from just a few kilometres down the road, so this isn’t proof of anything immutable. It seems to have been a tradition tied to place, but erratically, skipping streets and houses like a fickle hag’s curse.

I have canvassed friends from other parts of Ireland, in the same county and at the other end of the country and multitudes of spots in between, and everyone I’ve asked has been bewildered by the concept. You do what? Furrowed brows and incredulous laughter. And the first candle out denotes the next death? Were you raised in some sort of Satanic cult? Well no, this is definitely an Epiphany-adjacent ritual. For what? What’s it all about?

I don’t actually know. We treat it so much like sport that the meaning’s been laughed out of it. It’s an early January get-together. It celebrates family. Or the impending death of family – is that so strange?

I’ve found others describing the Twelve Candles in blog posts and on social media, but only in recent years; the first time I tried to search for information, I turned up nothing at all (maybe I had to wait for the older generation to adopt Facebook?). One post says the tradition was practised years back in Galway, Offaly and Westmeath. Another stresses that it’s solemn and sacred, that the candles represent the apostles, that a bigger candle can be added for Christ, and that the only words spoken over the flames are in prayer. A further says the candles used to be stuck into dried cow dung to keep them upright (so devout), and that afterwards, this dung cake was secreted in rafters as a talisman. There’s no mention of hooting and jibes, which doesn’t mean hooting and jibes have no legitimate place in the ritual, as these scant online posts aren’t substantiated by historical source anyway. As with so many things in Ireland, this is knowledge only half-remembered, but repeated just the same.

But that’s what I find endearing about faith in Ireland: how entwined Christianity is with folk ritual, how belief is a palimpsest. It’s very Irish, this idea of slapping some new thing over the old and hoping it’ll hold; it’s our ‘Be Grand’ mentality, somewhat fatalistic, somewhat optimistic, that tells us everything will probablywork out in the end. So, OK, here are the new rules, and a few of them got tangled up with the old rules so tightly we can’t extricate them, but shur look, be grand. This is why national symbol Brigid is simultaneously a goddess and one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and a County Kildare abbess and consecrated virgin of the 5^thcentury. And why, in the oral storytelling tradition, the sidhe — the fairies — keep butting heads with country priests. The steady Church may oppose the capricious sidhe, but these stories acknowledge that the sidhewere here first. Even now, many Irish people will neither uproot a hawthorn tree or enter a ringfort, though they will bluster or giggle in the declaration, because it’s not something we really believe; it’s just that we don’t not-believe it either. Our most common language, Hiberno-English, is spoken out both sides of our mouths. In our 2022 Census, 69% of Irish people reported that their religion was Roman Catholic. It was 78% in 2016, 84% in 2011. That the authority of Catholicism — as in the organised force of Catholicism, its pope and its cardinals and its hierarchies — has collapsed in Ireland might be ascribed to this amalgam of doctrine and superstition; we are an emotional flock more than we are a logical one. We know that faith is no science. If you want us to believe the fantasies and fabrications, you must give us something in return: kindness, encouragement, moral example. There wasn’t much of kindness or encouragement or moral example in the Magdelene Laundries or industrial schools. Weaken the foundations, and we will let the house fall down.

The question of faith is one I’ve had to reflect on over and over in my work, because I write about Ireland, and Ireland is consistently contradictory on this subject. Ireland is at once Christian and secular, superstitious and practical. Faith is not personal but a marker of tribe, even ethnicity; something you invoke for structure but not for guidance; something built into our vernacular and something that defined our nascent state and, decades later, brought it to its knees. My first novel was called The Glorious Heresies in an irritatingly obvious subversion of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary. In The Glorious Heresies, fifteen-year-old Ryan makes a goddess of his girlfriend, sex worker Georgie hustles her way into a Christian commune, and Maureen, a veteran of Magdalene Ireland, gets her kicks baiting confused clergymen. Catholicism, for the cast of Heresies, is something in the air and in the soil, but no longer necessarily in the way.

The specifics of my history complicate things. I was raised by my grandparents because my mother was still a teenager and unmarried. I was ‘illegitimate’, so I was adopted into the ‘legitimate’ family, where moral judgement could do me no real harm. It should go without saying that my grandparents were a great deal older than me, with the result being that I was exposed to articles of faith that would have, in your usual family unit, felt outdated. There was a holy water font by the front door, scapulars and Padre Pio prayer cards in the drawers, one of those pictures of the Sacred Heart over the range in the kitchen. And yet faith, in our family, meant gentle belief rather than doctrine; there was fond talk of ‘The Man Above’, but not much credence given to his many regulations. I was adopted into the family as a sort of sleight of hand solution to a problem of dishonour and disobedience; now you see me (as the product of faithlessness), now you don’t (for I am my grandparents’ child). For faith, ostensibly pure, was so easily twisted in Ireland, where the Catholic Church had for many decades sustained incredible influence. My grandmother is now ninety-three and still salty about the practice of ‘churching’, the purification ritual new mothers had to undergo in order to be allowed back into the church. ‘Imagine,’ she says. ‘We were told we had sinned by giving birth. And no talk at all about the fathers!’ So the credo in my family — in Ireland more broadly — had to be ‘Everything in moderation, even the Heaven and Hell stuff’, if we wanted to stay sane at all.

Beyond the Twelve Candles, and disregarding the usual sacraments — baptisms and weddings and Communions and so on — there weren’t many other Irish Catholic(ish) rituals practised by my family. I remember, as a small child, being given a booklet about Advent by my teacher, who was a nun. The book outlined a schedule of short prayers and candle-lighting one could follow for the season, which appealed to me, not least for the novelty. My grandmother sat with me for the first night of this programme, maybe the second, but then said she had better things to be doing than reciting prayers. She liked that I was a bookish and imaginative child, because that didn’t require much interaction; I could entertain myself. I could indoctrinate myself too, was her thinking. Religion, to my grandmother, had to be so well established as to be performed mechanically. Or else there had to be something social about it. Beyond that, there was no point in engaging with it.

My fiction is constructed around the reality of Ireland’s post-religious-pre-secular society. Religion and ritual are, of course, their own fictions — very powerful fictions. I teach undergrads in the University of Galway. When we examine the three-act narrative structure, it’s with the idea that they can adopt, subvert or reject it according to their own philosophy of storytelling. I tell them that it can feel restrictive and that it is a model I rarely engage with in my own creative work, but that we can also think of it as organic rather than fabricated, because it so easily adheres to the natural way we tell stories. Something happens, then things get complicated, then a solution is found.

As a writer, it’s easy for me to believe that story is what makes us human. We are more than biological impulses; we are meat-sacks and we are dreamers; our hearts beat until they don’t, and we say that process denotes love and thrill and anticipation and not just the contraction of atria and ventricles. Reality is at once practical and utterly chaotic. Our cells — fundamental, simple — sometimes reproduce uncontrollably and give us cancer. Our hormones regulate and coordinate our physiology and sometimes careen to the point of making us crazy. Each of us come from a long line of people hardy enough to reach the age of reproduction, but that’s no guarantee we won’t be hit by a bus in the morning. The brain, the mind, the spirit, however you define it, is the seat of our imagination, our creativity, our ambition, and yet it needs meaning, however wobbly that meaning’s construction, to survive. Reality — on the macro level at which we humans feel we exist, as individuals and not masses of cells crawling with microorganisms — makes no sense, so we have to make it make sense. This is the hole narrative fills. Stories impose order. The older, more traditionally composed the story, the more comforted we are. Religion is a collection of ancient stories in which we can choose to have faith; we can have folklore, or the Zodiac, or philosophy, or literary fiction alongside it or instead of it; story gives us a handle on things. Story’s what deemed me illegitimate, and story’s what had me reimagined, reabsorbed.

69% of us claim, still, to be Catholics. 14%, the next largest grouping, have no religion at all. This is the cohort to which I belong. I’ve drilled into religion and found story at its core and story’s what I believe in, story as intrinsic to humanity; just because I can see the artificialities of story doesn’t mean I think of it as unreal. The writer and television producer John Yorke says that stories fill a god-shaped hole. I wonder if he’s got it backwards; god is a story, so the idea that story is a sort of runner-up prize when faith is lost is a flawed idea, and on that basis god can’t leave an anything-shaped hole, because god, as a story, is not obligated to a defined form. Which is not to say that the areligious are immune to even more malignant methods of imposing order on chaos; you can fall prey to orthorexia or multi-level marketing or any number of grifters selling life-improvement courses on YouTube. You can, like the tech bros and billionaires, assume that through AI we can create a god, a real god this time (though all gods are manufactured, no? Therefore all gods are as real as one another). In this instance, god fills the god-shaped hole — but it’s still just manifestation incited by narrative. Ancient story tells us we need a celestial paternal authority, so the tech leaders in Silicon Valley ask themselves if, through their brave endeavours, they can make this happen.

AI-as-god tickles me, because, while worship as a concept might be pure and clean, what we in Ireland do with our gods is not exactly worship, it’s too flexible or recalcitrant to be worship. It’s hard to see how even super-intelligence might make sense of a faith defined by liminality. I don’t imagine the Vatican would be able to make sense of twelve candles stuck into a cowpat as a death divination ritual; what chance might a technological system have?

No one lives completely free from order; our bodies will self-regulate regardless of how we think we might move through the universe. The sun rises and sets; we fall unconscious every 16 or so hours. We know there is a beginning, though we can’t agree on exactly when it is. We know there is an inescapable end. Some of us tolerate rules in the pursuit of meaning, but none of us suffer them without. If you position twelve skinny candles on a thin board and watch them to see which burns down first, you can make fun of that end. The order is imposed by the acknowledging.

So I know I will go out like a candle at some point, that I have finite fuel to burn and a short wick. But we all know this to be true, and we have copious ways of dealing with this truth, depending on faith or lack thereof, or on heritage, education or personal philosophy. Still, I find it satisfying to say that this story is one I learned off the back of a cheap fireguard, in a crowded sitting room in a terraced house in south County Galway, with people who believe that the stuff the great men of faith tell us is deeply serious is, actually, not to be taken seriously at all.

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