Redding's Cascade Theatre welcomes 'Celtic Christmas'

Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas returns to Redding’s historic Cascade Theatre at 7:30 p.m. today, with all new stories, music and dances that celebrate Irish culture and the true meaning of the holiday season.

In the modern era, Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas might be considered an anomaly — it is neither hip nor chic, neither cynical nor sarcastic.

Few would consider it cool. It is a show out of kilter with our times — in that it neither ridicules nor Disneyfies Christmas.

Yet, for each of the past 14 years, A Celtic Christmas has played to packed concert halls and critical acclaim in cities all across the country.

Foley’s explanation is simply that the show takes Christmas at its word.

For him, taking Christmas at its word means attempting to create on stage, as faithfully as possible, some semblance of what Christmas meant to him as a child — a child growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s on a small farm in a remote community where the old communal way of life still held sway.

With Grammy-award winning guitarist William Coulter as music director, Foley achieves this by bringing together some of the most distinguished Celtic musicians and traditional dancers performing anywhere today — on either side of the Atlantic.

The stories, the music, the songs and the dance are drawn from another older time and place when Christmas itself is seen through eyes innocent of the phosphorescent flicker of television and computer screens.

When Foley was growing up in the remote parish of Teampall an Gleanntáin, “only a couple of local strong farmers could afford a radio.”

But, as Foley says “in the long wintry nights before Christmas, everyone could afford to gather at their neighbor’s cottage, and they’d bring with them their fiddles, uilleann pipes, tin whistles, flutes, bodhráns — and of course they’d bring their songs, stories and traditional dances.

When things got going later on in the night, you’d think they’d lift the rafters off the house with the music, and there’d be sparks flying off the flagstone floors when they danced the jigs, reels and hornpipes.

“This is the heart and soul of A Celtic Christmas — this is the night we recreate on stage — it leaves a glow long after the curtain comes down,” Foley said.

Tickets for A Celtic Christmas can be purchased online at www.cascadetheatre.org or by phone at 530-243-8877.

The Cascade Theatre/Jefferson Public Radio Performance Series is sponsored in part by US Bank.