Personal essay
The Road Home
The Glengarry Bhoys, a lucky number, and the roads that brought us here
An impulse decision, a lucky number, and a road home.
Read the essay →The CelticMFF Magazine, Christmas 2026: traditions, people, places, gifts
From the Publisher
What We Carry Home
Christmas 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…
Laureen MacBradaigh
The PDF edition
Take the Christmas Edition with you
Cover story · Feature
The Roads We’ve Walked
The Glengarry Bhoys and the places music carried us
There are bands whose geography is mostly a line in the biography. Then there are bands for whom place is part of the sound. The Glengarry Bhoys came out of Glengarry County in eastern Ontario, a Scots/French-Canadian community where Celtic music was not something imported for a festival weekend. It was part of the cultural landscape. The band’s own history traces its beginning to 1998, when Graham Wright and G. S. “Zig” Leroux began playing together. From there came records, festivals, concert halls and tours stretching across North America and across the Atlantic. But “Coming Home” asks a different question than a band biography does.
Feature
Geography and What We Call Home
Kozo Toyota of O’Jizo on the flexibility of tradition
For Japanese musician Kozo Toyota, Irish traditional music became more than a genre to learn. It became a way of thinking about family, cultural responsibility, and the unexpected places people find room for one another.
Read the story →Christmas around the world
Culture feature
Christmas, Half a World from Home
In Japan, winter traditions have traveled, changed and found new places to belong.
Feature
Who Gets to Write the Next Old Story?
Christmas traditions around the Celtic world: the customs people preserve, interrupt, revive and change.
Traditions · Around the world
A Celtic Christmas, Wherever You Are
From Scottish parades in Virginia to Irish gatherings in Australia, Celtic Christmas traditions have found homes far beyond the places where they began.
Film, music & culture
Film · Feature
When Home Isn’t a Place You Can Take for Granted
Liam Ó Mocháin’s Abode tells five very different stories about home, from a filmmaker who learned early that the word can mean belonging, uncertainty, family and absence all at once.
Music · On tour
Irish Christmas in America
For twenty-one Christmases, Oisín Mac Diarmada and Irish Christmas in America have carried the music, stories and traditions of Ireland across an ocean.
Film · Folklore
A New Winter Folklore
Two animated Christmas films from Wales and Ireland are doing something more interesting than preserving Celtic folklore. They’re creating new stories for another generation to inherit.
Food
The Christmas Table
What we carry home can fit on a plate.
Long before anyone says grace, raises a glass or argues over who makes the potatoes correctly, a Christmas table has already started telling a family story.
Gather around the table →The traditional Christmas
Culture · Scotland
Christmas Behind the Gates at Balmoral
A Christmas gift, a Highland home, and the stories that endure
Where the season’s grandest traditions took shape, and where our winter wanderings begin.
Travel · Markets
Lights On in the Celtic World
Twinkling streets, independent makers, seasonal food, and places worth lingering: a Christmas market guide spanning the Celtic nations and North America.
About the cover images
The issue cover and illustrated feature images are AI-generated illustrations created for this edition, not documentary photographs or production stills.