"Seasons Greetings"
Well, December is one of the busiest times for family and friends to exchange good cheer and recognize the loved ones in our lives or hopes of making new acquaintances and relationships which tie us closer together as a human family. I hope there is time for everyone to have God and His blessings in their own heart of hearts. Do something special for someone else and for yourself as well. Look at the past year's performance of individual labors and networking as a quality output of your energies. This was a successful year. There are challenges in our world and profession that are coming to be of themselves. Just make the best choices with an eye of futurity. Have fun this season and remember the cold days are here in Southern California as much as we find it hard to believe - this year has become increasingly colder than I can remember from last year. Okay, it has only be for a couple weeks since the rain fell down heavily! Here is a card from Calabruzi in Calabria for any fans: Buon Natale and Buon Auguri!
Surely the New Year has been over for sometime. Perhaps the most American tradition of spring is that of a continuation of holiday cheer. With both St. Patrick's Day and Easter being the most remembered days during this season. The City of Boston, Massachusetts has state offices closed for certain. I took the tram from outside the city limits and as I got out of the subway station found my way to the state records building, wouldn't you know that it was closed! Because it was St. Patrick's Day! How could I have made such a mistake?
Somewhere in my past was my grandfather of course! This one who actually was adopted by an elderly Sicilian American couple. Preferring not to be lonely in their later years took a liking to my grandfather James John and gave him the name of Frank. He grew to manhood as a healthy person. But he told his lineage to my mother as coming from Tipperary. Though, the name is from Scotland in origins. The fact is there was a chief amongst the Scots known by the title Cahir of the O'Ferrigans. Simply put: Cahir O'Ferrigan. The O'Reilly clan called upon him to help aid them in fighting for their sovereignty. Since that time of 1540 such was beginnings of the Ferrigan clan in Armagh and Lough counties Ireland. Here we have the term Scot-Irish as our heritage in origin for this particular grandfather I knew as Frank Anastasi. Growing up in an Italian neighborhood he found himself at some length to marry an Italian-American girl. Though both had known to been married before or had other children in previous relationships or perhaps as one record indicates could be tale or truth, since my grandfather had visited in his adulthood both his brother and sister who lived in New Hampshire. But for now I will not cover that material. So legally for certainty all of us are of Italian-American uprearing.
Here is an Irish Tale for the season of St. Patrick:
Grandfather's Ghost
James Small * Down
Ronald H. Buchanan 1956
I can remember me sister and meself sitting on two creepies in front of the open fire; there was a hen with a flock of birds in the hole at the side of the brace. There was nobody in the house but our two selves. ye know where the room door was yonder on the left-hand side? Well I looks up and there was a man standing at it with a long-tartled coat and a beard and a hard hat on him. He was a big man, just the full of the door; and he was a sort of bent over, standing leaning on two sticks. He looked at the pair of us, and turned on his heel and walked into the room again.
Well, me mother was out in the yard, and I called her and she came running in and we told her what we'd seen. And she went and got me aunt and they both went down the room together, but they could see nothing. When me father came home that night he tacked me with what I seen, so I told him what the old man looked like, and he just shook his head. "It was your grandfather," says he. And mind ye, he was dead afore I was born.
So now be a little Irish if you can be, or the Irish fairy here will get you when you least expect her to come along at you.