A Few Ways to Make your Christmas Just Like Ireland

What is Christmas like in Ireland? To those folks who want to make their holidays a bit more green, follow this advice. 

If you are Irish in descent, but you live worlds away, you can still find meaningful ways to incorporate Irish culture into your holidays. There is a simple way to start and that is with the Irish language. “Nollaig Shona Duit” is the phrase which means “Happy Christmas” in Irish. It is pronounced as null-ig hunna ditsh.

There are subtle ways that you can go about this. If you visit a site like Shutterfly, you can personalize items like candles with your favorite phrases. You can get photos of Christmas in Ireland as well and even add them to a candle. Photobucket has a collection of photos for the Irish holidays. You can also find your favorite images of Ireland during Christmas practically anywhere on the internet. However, the trick is to find the images that appeal to you the most and then personalize them.

Irish phrases can also be added to napkins and towels to make the experience more familiar in your home. The Stationary Studio is a great place to stop. Depending on the type of holiday that you are having, whether it be big or small,
they have many items for you to choose from.

If you are throwing a Christmas party, for example, then napkins would be a delightful approach to have on hand for your guests to see.  You can also customize bar ware for a dinner party with favorite Irish holiday slogans. Ornaments are another item that can be personalized into Irish themes. They even have cute beverage sticks that can be etched.

So far the suggestions we’ve covered are small and detailed. However, one tradition that is big everywhere for Christmas are lights. If you are really excited about the season and you want to do a bigger display, you can make your own rope light string and then use it to spell anything that you want. Pretty Handy Girl gives a how-to on making your own rope light word wall art. Besides “Nollaig Shona Duit” there are other common holiday phrases like “Athbhliain faoi Mhaise Duit” which means
“Happy New Year.”

I realize that some of these phrases are pretty long which means they would take a lot of rope light, but you can always paint out the phrases instead. The point is that you can be really creative even in tiny ways and the message will be abundantly clear how much Ireland means to you during the holiday season.