Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas

For 29 years, with a world-class ensemble of musicians, dancers and singers from both sides of the Atlantic, Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas has played to packed concert halls and to critical acclaim nationwide, recreating on stage the now-famous Rambling House; that remote cottage in the West of Ireland, where the neighbors gather every year for a communal night before Christmas. There, the rafters ring with fiery traditional music, Irish Christmas carols, riveting traditional dance and, of course, stories of life in the remote parish of Teampall an Ghleanntáin, Tomáseen’s birthplace. The show invites its audience to come into that cottage, into that world, into that era, with us, and be our neighbors for the night. “When I was a child, it was around the fireplace of my neighbors’ thatched cottage that I experienced the last remnants of the old communal way of life. The family was the center of the community then, and the community was the center of life itself; the shining axle around which the great wheel of the universe revolved. Stories, music, song and dance were the spokes of that slowly turning wheel.” -TOMÁSEEN FOLEY