~ Native Irish StorytellerTomaseen Foley is the second youngest of a family of seven children, born and reared on a small farm in the remote parish of Teampall an Ghleantain in the West of Ireland. The stories he tells have their source in the vitality and warmth of the ordinary people of that small place... magical crumbs that fell to his lap from the infinitely rich table of life in a tiny community where his family still lives, still farming the same small green fields --- as his ancestors have done for the past 250 years.
In the West of Ireland in the days before the motor car, the television, and the telephone, the spirit of Christmas tumbled down the chimney and into the hearths of Irish homes with all the joy and innocence of a December snowflake. Irish families sat around the roaring fire with their neighbours telling stories and singing songs fragrant with turf smoke. Long, long before Riverdance, ordinary Irish people in hob-nailed boots knocked sparks off the flagstone floors when they danced jigs, reels, and hornpipes, and the rafters rang with the fiery music of the fiddle, bodhran and uilleann pipes.
By the time Tomaseen was a young man there was little left of the old traditions: “Only the smoke from the embers of their dying fire” was how his grandmother put it. But by breathing new life into those Old World embers, the stories themselves rekindle the flame in the hearth and recapture the warmth and grace of a Celtic Christmas. Tomaseen brings to American audiences stories as redolent of Ireland as stone walls and green fields. With this strong connection to the immigrant experience, Irish or other, his narrations help us answer the question of what life was like for the people who stayed behind.
