Nighttime in Listowel December 2017

Listowel Castle at night

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The very last of the exhibitors at the BOI Enterprise Town event

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December 2017 Nightime in Listowel

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Christmas in the 1920s by Eamon Kelly     Concluded

.....The hearth was the friendliest place in the house. The place to talk, to sing and to listen to a good story, to hear the conversation of the grown-ups and to let on not to hear little bits of gossip or some scandal our elders seemed to take an unlaughing pleasure in. The hearth was the place where the mother read out the American letters from Aunt Margaret, Aunt Mary and our Aunty Bridgie, and counted out the dollars they, and Aunt Liz, had sent us. We would all repeat the American address where our aunts lived to see who’d remember it best. It was Ditmar’s Boulevard, Astoria, Queens, Long Island, New York. The hearth was the place where we knelt before the supper on Christmas Eve for The Rosary with the trimmings we thought would never end.

When it was time for us all small lads to go to bed we’d hang up our stockings along the mantle shelf and on the crane to make sure Daidí na Nollag wouldn’t forget us. Even if was only a new penny it would be welcome. A penny was a great treat in those days when you would get five bulls eyes for a half penny and two peggy’s legs for a full penny. In the end we would have to be hunted to bed we would be so lazy leaving the warm hearth. But the promise of driving in the pony and trap through the dark to early mass in the morning would finally shift us, but we weren’t gone yet. We’d all have to stand at the front door to admire the bunches of lights in the houses down along the valley and up the rising ground to Rossacrew, all the little lights winking and blinking through the dark until, as the man said, the earth below looked like a reflection of the starry Heaven above.

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The Listowel Arms is looking very festive

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The Catechism

Boy did people remember this! I think the following email sums up most of the feedback I got .

Hi, Mary, The Catechism had 'all the answers' - and was all black-and-white! No grey areas! O tempora O mores!

In my young days - 50s and 60s - religion was terrorised into us- often accompanied by a bit of pummelling, just to concentrate the mind!

Even to this day, churches can  inspire an atavistic dread of hell-fire and damnation. We must only trust that there is something better in store for us. We shall see...

The most-remembered thing about the Catechism for me is the phrase concocted from reversing its  letters: Master Sits In His Chair Each Time At Catechism. (Except when he rises to cuff home the message of love and forgiveness!).