Joyce's "The Dead" takes place today 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, la festa della Befana. Joyce turns the usual comforting Christmas tale of new life, new hope, into a meditation on the darker and more painful side of the season marked by death, memory, loss. Thread 
"The Dead" corrects some of the bleakness of the earlier stories in Dubliners. Joyce wrote that he had "been unnecessarily harsh" in not reproducing any Dublin's "ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter “virtue” so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe"
Joyce wrote this extraordinarily mature winter's tale when he was just 25. Part of its inspiration came from a tough Christmas he and Nora spent in Rome in 1906. Christmas dinner, he complained, was just an uninspiring plate of pasta.
That bleak Roman Christmas led Joyce to think of more lavish Christmas gatherings in his past and from it he conjured up The Dead which offers a wonderful evocation of hospitality and a luscious description of the laden Christmas table.
A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin ...
The Dead is also a fitting story for #NollaigNamBan (the Irish women's Christmas) as Gabriel is made aware of his failure to see and properly hear the three women who challenge him: Lily, the caretaker's daughter, Miss Ivors, and of course his wife, Gretta.
The role of women is key. Aunt Kate "fiercely" replies to her niece about the position of women in the Church. She is furious that Aunt Julia has lost her place in the choir: "it's not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there.
The Dead is a moving meditation on lost love and on lost intimacy within a marriage. It shows the damaging effect on Gabriel of relying on habit and his need to move beyond the superficial so as to see and accept Gretta's depth, history, and mystery.
This is the Gabriel's great epiphany, his moment of revelation or realization or, in Joyce's words "sudden spiritual manifestation". You could do worse today than read "The Dead" or even watch John Huston's moving film version with Donal McCann and Angelica Huston.
Today is a good day to remember that the House of the Dead at 15 Usher's Island remains at risk. We continue to hope that the powers that be will find a way to secure this unique heritage site for future generations. Perhaps the Ulysses centenary will spur some safeguard action.
Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely
churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. "A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again.
He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
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