In 2008, Mom was a Fulbright scholar to Canada, hosted by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Heather, Leslie, Dave, and I went there to spend Christmas with her. Here are a couple of photos Mom took during our holiday outings.
C-Ville Weekly published a fascinating article about the Blue Ridge Tunnel project. Also, please don’t forget Kevin Donleavy’s radio show this Saturday:
A chairde and pals,
I neglected to mention that one of the best gifts I received came by email on December 24. Our editors extended our deadline from January 7 to January 21! Yippie!
We’re never in a hurry to open gifts when we’re at Mom’s for Christmas. Gifts just aren’t the focus of our gathering. This year, we waited until today, December 27, to make our exchanges.
We had a lot of fun, nonetheless. The pictures look much like the past five years (the same five characters, the same house). This year, we’re just a bit older and, hopefully, wiser. You’ll see from my photos that the gifts we give tend to be practical, educational, or cultural….
Heather spent hours and hours preparing a day-after-Christmas feast. She made traditional fixings, as well as special vegetarian dishes for herself, and gluten-and-everything-else free dishes for me. (I got a food allergy test done December 6, and the results have been a real downer for my Christmas meals.)
Thanks for tuning in! It gives me reason to share stories of Ireland and home….
Mike Heivly, Kevin Donleavy, and Dave Chance at Mike’s art studio in Charlottesville, Virginia — filled with the essence of Ireland.
The fragile gift bag I toted from Ireland sheltered two vinyl records by Jerry Crilly’s old band, Rakish Paddy. Jerry sent one home as a gift for me and the other for his friend Kevin Donleavy, who we managed to locate in mid-November.
This vinyl record is a collector’s item, Kevin tells me. He played the CD version on his radio show a few weeks back.
Incidentally, he has a new show airing this Saturday, December 29 on the UVA radio station. Click here for directions on how to listen online.
The vinyl records were both a heartfelt gift from Jerry and a plausible excuse for me to find Kevin — who, I’d informed Jerry, Dave and I would be driving right past on our holiday trek across Virginia.
We met Kevin at his colleague’s studio in Charlottesville. Mike Heivly has filled the studio, located in a church’s unused classroom, with fascinating poems and images of Ireland.
Mike is as enamored with Irish lore as the rest of us, as you can see by the images of his work.
It turns out, Kevin has enlisted Mike to help with documenting the railway in Charlottesville that was built in the 1850s by about 2,100 Irish and 90 slaves. A full account is posted by The Blue Ridge Railway Project (at www.clannmhor.org), which explains “Clann Mhór – which in Gaelic means the Great Family – wishes to honor the history of these forgotten railroad workers.”
Mike also has beautiful images of Newgrange and the famine village near Dingle town.
Although Dave and I were instrumental in re-connecting Jerry and Kevin, it turns out that Kevin himself is a master at connecting people. Particularly around subjects of Ireland. Here’s an email I received from Kevin after our visit:
Hiya, Shannon agus Dave,
Dear Kevin,
Hi, Mark,Was driving in the Emmet Street neighborhood here in Charlottesville the other day and saw your sculpture of The Storyteller. Very nice work, and in an a propos siting, too, since the street is named after heroic Robert Emmet’s nephew: John Patten Emmet was chosen by Thomas Jefferson to be on the initial faculty of the new U. Va. in the 1820s.Several of us will help spread the word about your sculpture within the Irish mini-community here. There is BRIMS, the Blue Ridge Irish Music School; you can google them. I myself do a regular program of Irish trad music on-line and FM on WTJU.org here (next show is Sat., Dec.1, from 10 am till 12 noon). Have a gander at our website, www.clannmhor.org, where our collective is documenting the 2,100 or so Irish and the 90 slaves who built the railway here in the 1850s.Why don’t you e-mail and tell me more about your ogham-sculpture and other efforts, which will give us some background to this work of yours. If you are ever in Cville, especially on a first Sat any month, I can have you chat on the radio program. How’s that ?Hope to hear from you,Kevin
Ballybunion, where the River Shannon meets the Atlantic Ocean (photo from http://www.irelands-directory.com/photos.php?Image=582)
High Street in Ballybunion, Ireland (image from http://www.seashorebandbballybunion.com/seashore-things-to-do-121.aspx)
Mom decided to phone her cousin Eilish O’Hanlon in Ireland’s County Kerry for Christmas yesterday. Eilish sounded very happy to hear from us… she said the call made her day!
Mom also dug out the family tree that her Aunt Jo researched in the 1980s. What do you know — Eilsih and her husband Con are on it!
Speaking of Aunt Jo, Mom phoned her yesterday as well. She lives in Ocala, Florida and raises race horses. There’s a race horse somewhere out in the world that Aunt Jo named for my mom. (Aunt Jo is my Grandma Zeliff’s sister. Of course, Mom also phoned her two Zeliff siblings, Carolyn and Harry yesterday. She’s a chatty one, my mom.)
So now I know: Eilish is mom’s second cousin. They share two great-grandparents.
And Eilish says that Tom Mulligan (the proprietor of the Cobblestone pub in Dublin) is her husband’s first cousin.
The family tree is starting to make more sense to me now. (As is the nearby Mulligan tree that is, apparently, in the same grove!)
I’ve posted some photos other people have taken of Ballybunion, near where Con and Eilish live. It’s the town where my great-grandmother’s birth is recorded and where some members of our family tree are buried.
Raclette!
The Star Barn the day after Christmas 2012.
It seems fitting to celebrate Christmas in Pennsylvania Dutch country with traditions imported from the old world.
In this case, we imported some of them ourselves. Every year my mom, sister, husband, friend Leslie, and I celebrate Christmas together with raclette for dinner.
Raclette is a specialty that my Swiss host families introduced me to when I was an exchange student there in 1994. Following that exchange, I returned to Switzerland many times and frequently partook in the cheesy treat.
Dave and I enjoyed raclette together with my former boss’s daughter Simone, in Carona, Switzerland in February 1997. Mom developed the taste for it when the two of us spent Christmas 1996 in Switzerland with the Sterchi and Ehernsperger families.
Before Christmas each year now, Dave and I purchase raclette imported from Switzerland or France by Mandros Foods in Lancaster, PA. Then we pull out the raclette grill that Dave ordered as a gift for me many years ago (he bought it from a place in Minnesota). Once my red raclette grill heats up, we melt the cheese in the little pans and eat it along with potatoes and a variety of pickled vegetables.
The first time I ate raclette I’d been in Switzerland just three weeks. The Land Jugend, which works in collaboration with the International Four-H Youth Exchange (IFYE) program to host exchange students from around the world, invited us “up the Alp” for a weekend adventure. We milked cows, cooked cheese in a huge copper kettle, and celebrated the weekend with a variety of characters who spend their summers on this particular mountaintop.
Our group had assembled in a parking lot in the valley near Wengen, Switzerland. We had hiked up, up, up — emerging above the tree line to a place where streams form from melting snow and tufts of summer grass peek through the rocky terrain.
We had arrived in the land of Heidi.
You may recall that in the children’s storybook, Heidi and her grandpa went up the Alp with the cows. They would have lived in a chalette without electricity — milking the cows and storing the milk as cheese — while folks down in the valleys gathered the summer hay.
The Swiss do this so their cows can eat the grass that grows in un-harvestable places, thus preserving the grass in the flatter (harvestable) lands to cut, dry, and store for use in the cold, winter months.
My first raclette was quite authentic: up on this Alp, in a house where the barn and the living quarters lie under the same roof, we built a roaring August fire. We placed a half wheel of raclette cheese near the open flame. Once the exposed surfaces of the cheese wheel melted, we scraped the gooey part onto plates to eat with red-skinned potatoes, gerkins, baby corn, and the like.
Melt, scrape, repeat… all evening long!
My biological family enjoyed the raclette tradition as much as my hosts. So, we make it part of our Christmas gathering every year now. In addition to raclette, we often celebrate Christmas with the candleholders that the Sterchi family sent Mom some years back. (In Switzerland, many families use real candles with real flames to light their trees. When we have a live tree, we do, too, but with tremendous care.)
I was such a lucky kid to be able to live in Switzerland on a cultural immersion program. I’m incredibly grateful for that five months of 1994 when I had opportunity to live with six wonderful families. I hope to one day find them all again.
My hosts are listed below. I’ve stayed in contact with the first family, but I’ve lost touch with the others. (You’ll recall my November blogs about Esther’s visit to Dublin. )
I’ve temporarily gone blank on a couple of names (I’ll come back and fill them in when they return to my mind). If you can help me locate any of them, please email me at shannonchance (at) wm (dot) edu.
I am so incredibly thankful to each of these families for taking me in, sharing their traditions, and showing me the ropes of being a global citizen.
I am also eternally grateful to my 4-H extension agent, Dr. Joyce Martin, who made many learning opportunities possible for me in my youth. Dr. Martin passed away this very morning after a 14-month bout with pancreatic cancer. She was one of my earliest mentors and she made a world of difference in my life.
Had it not been for Dr. Martin, I might never have been an IFYE.
I have fond memories of traveling with Dr. Martin to the 1985 International Egg and Poultry Convention in Louisville, KY . I was competing in egg cookery demonstration and — with her coaching and encouragement — I garnered third place in the national competition. She was so proud because I was one of the youngest participants, and held my own against a group of contestants ranging from 15-19 years old.
I couldn’t have done so well without her! My parents also helped me prepare (by buying many eggs and by heckling me while I rehearsed so I could learn to ignore distractions).
And, my grandmother (Lillian “Ma” Massie) made huge contributions. Ma hand-sewed my apron and two dresses especially for the trip. I was the height of 4-H fashion in 1985!
Here’s a little tribute to the family traditions around the world, sent out today in honor of Joyce Martin and Lillian Massie:
The Christmas trek Dave and I make each year includes Harrisonburg (VA), Middletown (PA), and Salisbury (MD). The drive from our home in the flatlands of Portsmouth (VA) to the mountains of Virginia something I anticipate with enthusiasm. We usually experience snowflakes at points during our trip and we often get to see horses drawing Mennonite and Amish carriages along the way. My aunt Kitty Lee lives in Mennonite country and my mom lives in Amish country.
Ireland by Chance 