Stock up on some festive storytelling for Christmas

THE Irish are noted storytellers and raconteurs and there is no better time than Christmas to pull up a chair by the fireside and be entertained.
John B Keane has a multitude of Christmas stories, tales and anecdotes of Christmas times past and with John B there is usually an unexpected twist to the tale. In his story “ The Magic Stoolín” we learn of the unexpected bonus of a barrel of porter that did fall off a lorry on the bog road into the lap of Jack Tobin just before Christmas, despite an endeavour to locate the proper owner proving fruitless, and then rolling the barrel home on a dark Winter evening he tells us “ Inside the wooden casket the porter chuckled and gurgled tantalisingly. After a few moments the interior noises stopped. Jack Tobin rightly surmised that the rolling movements had brought a head to the barrel’s contents. His mouth watered at the prospect of savouring the first mouthful of the cherished brew.” That was a good Christmas at Jack Tobin’s house.
Alice Taylor with her flair for creating pictures of rural Ireland in the mid-20th century tells us of Christmas Eve when Christmas began in all households, “they stuck the holly branches through hooks hanging from the ceiling where they shared places with bits of 'yalla' bacon.”

Read more in this week's Library Corner in The Tuam Herald