On this Christmas day, the staff of the Exchange are enjoying the holiday at home.
In our place, JPR presents one of our favorite holiday programs: Tom Foley’s “A Celtic Christmas”.
This classic look at Ireland’s cultural heritage has become a Christmas-day tradition through the years. It re-creates ‘a night before Christmas’ in the West of Ireland in the 1940s; the days before the motorcar, television, and the telephone.
Traditionally, in the remote parish of Tomáseen Foley’s birthplace, the neighbors gathered at each other’s farmhouses on the nights leading up to Christmas, bringing with them their fiddles, tin whistles, flutes, bodhráns, uilleann pipes, and, perhaps, most important of all, their unshakeable sense of community.
They gathered to raise the rafters of the old houses with the joy of their music, to knock sparks of the flagstone floor with their traditional dances and, of course, to tell stories.
They filled the night with the laughter of their stories A Celtic Christmas brings to life just such a night.
From all of us here on the Jefferson Exchange, have a wonderful Christmas.