I finished the "Houndstooth" quilt top. I'm glad this is done; this is the one I have my name on the "list" for at my parents' church for the quilting group to quilt it for me. I can take it up there at Christmas and leave it with my mom for when they are ready for it.

I think it turned out well. I'm particularly happy with the fabric I chose for the background; I don't think I could have picked a better one.



Here's a close up of one corner, showing some of the fabrics better:



It's a nice pattern and it works up nicely, but wow, do all those little houndstooth bits get tedious to cut. (You sew a strip of background to a strip of theme fabric, and then cut squares on a diagonal. Four of the squares go together to make a block. There are 36 blocks in this so 4 x 36 = 144 of the little houndstooth pieces. It felt like more than that.)

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I went to a Celtic Christmas concert on campus last night. It was very interesting and very well-done. (The person I went with said it was "Different from what [they] expected" which I take as a polite way of their saying they didn't like it - based on how they said it. It was a little different from what *I* expected but it was really nice and fun in places and moving in others). It wasn't like a traditional concert so much - there were songs, but there was also dancing and a lot of storytelling.

The dancing was amazing: it was the traditional sort of dancing where the dancer's upper body stays absolutely still while they kick and tap and do things with their feet I can't quite begin to describe. There was both a man and a woman who danced; at one point they had a bit of a contest. ("Testosterone versus estrogen" as the storyteller/M.C. put it).

The music ranged in style from the fast, cheerful dance tunes that are probably my favorite part of Celtic music, to more contemporary pieces (but still carrying a strong sense of their heritage) to a couple of old, old pieces - one with a lone singer singing in Gaelic and being accompanied on the Uilleann pipes. And in that one, I could hear the old Viking influence on British Isles culture (I think I read somewhere that Celtic knotwork actually originated from some Viking art). It had that strange "Northern" sound that I've heard in some Scandinavian and Icelandic music - the music of people who are isolated for a large part of the year by bad weather, people who often rely on the sea for transportation and livelihood, people with a strong spiritual life (albeit one that would be totally foreign to most of us modern people).

The main thread of the concert was the tale of Bridget Kelley, also known as Bridie of the Birds (because she loved animals and they seemed to love her). I assume - since the storyteller didn't give any attribution - that it was a more or less embellished version of something that actually happened in his growing-up years. He was somewhere in his 60s or early 70s so I guess it would have been rural western Ireland in the 1950s. Poverty was still high, most people were (apparently) subsistence farmers. Most families depended on packages from family who had migrated to America in order to have a Christmas - gifts and clothes were sent, and, it seemed most importantly, money - "fine American dollars" as the storyteller said his father designated them.

Well, Bridie was a widow woman. Her husband, in fact, had died 17 years previously, on the very day her son was born. Her son was one of the lights of her life, even if he was a difficult and unhelpful boy. (The other light of her life was her cow. Apparently in rural Ireland, if you had a milch cow, that was as good a hedge against total poverty as anything). Bridie loved the cow; she had taught it to drink sweetened tea from a cup (!) and it would share her toast in the morning.

One day one November, Bridie woke up to find her son gone. And her cow gone. And, in fact, anything of value she had in the world gone - apparently the son took those things without telling her, sold the cow, and (it was assumed) went to seek his fortune in America*

(*and oh, how I was hoping that the story would end as a sort of Prodigal Son story, but that was not to be).

Bridie took to her bed - the two things she loved most in life were gone, and worse, her son had betrayed her and stolen from her. The storyteller's family was the closest one to her, and in those days, the "welfare" program in rural Ireland was that neighbors took care of people fallen on hard times. So it fell to the storyteller - who was in his teens at the time - to go over and make up the fire and fix the tea and bread for Bridie so she could survive. He had been strongly warned by his grandmother not to talk about the son, not to try to raise Bridie's hopes, but he could not resist: Christmas was coming on and he suggested that perhaps her son would send her a letter - or even a package - from America.

(Understand that we don't know for sure that that's what happened; the son could just as well have ended his life in a Dublin pub or in a gutter somewhere).

The storyteller said he was cheered to see Bridie imperceptibly start to brighten - to slowly regain the desire to live. For the week or so before Christmas eve, she began to wait at her door for the post, in the hopes that a letter (or even package) would come.

(And you must know, how hard I was hoping, as I heard the story, that it would)

Christmas eve - the last post before Christmas - came. The postman showed up at the last house before Bridie's - the home of the storyteller and his family. No package for poor Bridie. And the grandmother of the storyteller knew what he had done - that, despite her warnings, he had planted the idea in Bridie's mind that her son JUST MIGHT post something to her.

So a quick family confab was called.

The package from America was opened; everything that could possibly be used or enjoyed by Bridie was set aside and rewrapped. The family's address was cut off the box; Bridie's substituted in. The storyteller was sent off to write a convincing letter-from-America that just might have been from Bridie's son, and include an apology for breaking her heart. And finally, every one of the Fine American Dollars sent to everyone in the family was collected, stuffed in an envelope, and included with the apologetic letter, with the suggestion that Bridie might just use it to buy herself a new cow.

And then the family trooped out in the cold, starlit night (and the storyteller told it far, far better than I ever could), and in that moment, they ceased to be a single separate family unit, and they ceased to think of what they could have bought with their Fine American Dollars, and they became a part of the larger family of humanity. And the storyteller said something about how the Holy Family could have been traveling out on those Irish roads that Christmas Eve night, and passed them on their way...

As the storyteller's voice trailed off, the auditorium was silent...

And then, he told us, as the house lights came up, that one of the traditions of the "Rambling House" (which, he said, was what the Irish Christmas celebrations-at-home were sometimes called) was that everyone had a chance to join in and sing. And he led us in a couple verses of "Silent Night."

And I am generally a person with - despite what I may write here - too tight a rein on my "public" emotions; I tend to hold things inside. But that evening, after that story, and surrounded by hundreds of other people singing the old, old words (which were originally German but I now think belong to any place where Christmas is celebrated), I did notice the room grow a bit dusty and wavery for a moment.

And then, out into the clear cold night, wishing a Merry Christmas to a few people I knew that I saw at the concert. And looking up at the stars as I walked back to my car, and wondering about the few distant relatives *I* have back in Ireland - who they are, what they are doing.