From the Publisher | November/December 2026
What We Carry Home
By Laureen MacBradaigh, PublisherChristmas has always been full of homecomings.
We sing about them. We make films about them. Airports fill with people trying to get back in time. Families recreate meals they have eaten for generations. We unpack ornaments that have survived moves, marriages, children and decades. We play the same music and tell the same stories because, for a little while, we want Christmas to feel the way we remember it.
But there is something those Christmas stories don’t always tell us.
Sometimes you can’t go home.
Sometimes the house is gone. Families scatter across countries and oceans. Relationships end. Communities change. People leave because they have to, or because there is nothing there for them anymore.
And sometimes the person who made a place feel like home dies.
There are losses from which we don’t simply recover. Life continues, because it does, but continuing isn’t the same thing as getting something back. There are empty places that remain empty.
Christmas can make those absences particularly loud.
Perhaps that is also why traditions matter so much at this time of year.
Not because they can undo loss. They can’t.
A song cannot bring someone back. A recipe cannot recreate the kitchen where you first tasted it. Speaking a language cannot return you to the village your family left generations ago. An old Christmas custom cannot stop the world around it from changing.
But these things can carry something forward.
That idea runs through our November and December stories at CelticMFF.
In Irish Christmas in America, fiddler Oisín Mac Diarmada and generations of musicians have spent more than twenty years carrying Irish music, stories and Christmas traditions across an ocean. Some of the musicians who helped carry them are no longer here. Others have taken their place. The people change. The music continues.
In the Irish film Abode, the familiar promise of “home for Christmas” meets the reality that home itself is not guaranteed.
In Wales, The Ghost of Midwinter reaches into an older tradition of winter storytelling to create something new, passing culture forward not by preserving it untouched, but by giving another generation a story of its own.
Elsewhere this season we’ll visit Christmas markets and winter festivals, listen to music, meet artists and makers, explore traditions, share food and discover celebrations across the Celtic world and its diaspora.
Some of those stories will be joyful. They should be.
Because carrying something forward isn’t only an act of grief.
It can be dancing.
It can be cooking something your grandmother taught you to make, even if yours never tastes quite like hers did. It can be teaching a child a song. It can be hearing a fiddle across a crowded room. It can be speaking words your ancestors carried across an ocean. It can be gathering with people you’ve never met before and discovering that, for an evening, nobody feels quite so far from home.
Traditions survive because people keep choosing them.
They take what was handed to them, add something of themselves, and hand it on.
Maybe that is one of the quieter truths beneath all our Christmas homecomings.
We cannot keep everything.
We cannot keep everyone.
But we can decide what we carry with us.
And sometimes, what we carry becomes part of someone else’s home too.
Laureen MacBradaigh
Laureen MacBradaigh, Publisher
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