The ‘Debs,’ also called the ‘Grad’ here in Ireland is a really, really big deal.
They do not make a big deal here about graduating from high school because the senior students do 3 weeks of Leaving Certificate exams in June and then have to wait until the middle of August while the exams are graded in another part of the country to find out if they even graduated. So no “Send me Money” graduation notices are sent out. No senior pictures, no big graduation parties that seem to almost be obligatory in the States. Just the ‘Grad’ and they are for the students, not their families. The ‘Grad’ is like prom in the U.S. but more important socially and less date oriented. Sligo has one huge all male secondary school with 800 boys. There are 2 all girl secondary schools and 2 smaller co-ed schools. The Grad for each school is a last hurrah for 6th year students, or seniors. An opportunity to party together one more time before most of their paths part forever. It’s a coming of age party for everybody. Secondary school is over and the first day of the rest of everybody’s lives begins the day after. Like in the States, way too much money goes into planning the Grads. Girls spend a fortune on their dresses unless they take extreme measures. And many get fake tans. My daughter, Maura, took the train all the way to Dublin and spent an entire day looking for her dress. She did well. She found a beautiful dress on sale for 70 euro while most of her friends spent in excess of 225 euro. The drinking age in Ireland is 18. So most, if not all, of the grad-goers take cabs or get a ride home from a parent. Actually, most sleep at a house party they attend after a two-tiered evening at a hotel for first, dinner, and then a Sligo nightclub (Envy) which caters mainly to over-18-year-olds but under 22-year-olds. They eat breakfast in their formal attire at a local cafe. Then it’s all over and their university and/or working selves emerge like butterflies.

Irish Dance Solo Dresses

In the Liffey Rivers Irish Dancer Mysteries there is an intense 'quest for the dress' in the first book of the series. Liffey's first solo dress. An Irish dancer's first solo dress is more important than a future prom or grad dress and much more important than a future wedding gown.

There are many Irish dance dress designers and solo dress fads, and like those in the fashion world, they come and go. In this year. Out next year. Considering the fact that sometimes a dancer has to wait almost an entire year to get her dress from an over-booked designer, it can be a risky venture. A dancer's possible growth and weight loss/gain has to be factored in by these dress designers so they leave room to expand and contract in their dresses.

Recently, I have been amazed at some of the new designs. Irish dance solo dresses have, in some cases, begun to look more like figure skating costumes. They are very short and in most cases, I think unflattering. Often the dress material looks like it belongs in a roller skating arena. Or circus.

The photo above of Silverlode Needlecraft dresses is inspiring. These dresses seem to have the magic and fairy tale appeal that many Irish dance dress designers have apparently abandoned.

Garden Gate To Haunted Door

It all seems so ordinary when the supernatural crashes into your daily routine. It is hard to stand back and look at the intrusion with a proper perspective. How could it seem so unspectacular? A ghost knocking furiously at your lovely Irish cottage door every few days?

This beautiful path leads to the front door of my first home in Ireland in 2004. Charming. Quaint. Etc. This path is haunted by a spirit who wants to be admitted into the cottage. It knocks at any hour--mostly at night but sometimes during the day.

The spirit knocked around 7 times before we moved. It would pound on the front door like an anxious child escaping from a bully who wanted someone to open the door immediately. There was urgency in the knocking. Each time it happened I would open the door expecting to see a human form. I never did. No one was ever there.

Thunderbirds

In the mid-1950's I often toured the University of Notre Dame campus in my Thunderbird Junior. It was a battery-operated, light green fiber glass car for children. It went 6 mph. My mother won it in a Minute Maid Orange Juice jingle contest. It made me very popular in Vetville, the married student housing where my parents lived for 4 years. Kids would line up to drive my sports car and my mother would serve popcorn and kool aid. Notre Dame in the 1950's was a great place to grow up, especially in the summers when the male students were gone and hundreds of nuns from all over the world would arrive to do summer school courses. The Thunderbird Junior was my first and last sportscar. I would still be riding around in it if I could fit.

Bog Butter found in Donegal

Apparently, the Celtic gods liked their bodies buttered....

My New Year’s Resolution for 2009 was to become an expert on ‘bog butter.’

For starters (no pun intended), I have already heard of bog butter. This is very important if you are going to become an expert on any subject. And even more importantly, I think the bog butter topic is actually interesting. There are miles and miles of brown bog land on top of the Ox Mountains behind my house, so I already know what bog looks like, which is essential if you are going to become a bog butter expert. I will develop interesting theories and ideas about butter found in the bog as I work my way up the expert ladder. There’s no big rush. Some of it has been buried in the bog for thousands of years already.

If the truth were to be told though, I am not sure I would ever want to actually taste bog butter. It’s not that it looks particularly unappealing. In photos, it could be white cheddar cheese and sometimes it resembles paraffin wax. The information I have seen posted at museum bog butter displays, says that bog butter is often found packed in wood such as wicker, or animal skin containers, which are sometimes dug up when turf or peat is being harvested for fuel. The school of thought is that when this butter was made, it was put into a hole down in the bog to preserve it and maybe even flavor it.

The first time I saw bog butter was in the tiny County Sligo Museum. I observed what appeared to be a big butter churn in a glass case. Upon inspection, I discovered that it was actually petrified bog butter that weighed 123 lbs.! It is thought that the ancient Celts used to offer big butter balls to their gods by burying them in the bogs as sacrificial offerings, often on borderlands between rival clans. Sometimes they offered human sacrifices too, and well-preserved bog bodies do turn up near bog butter from time to time. Apparently, the Celtic gods liked their bodies buttered!

Institutions such as The Royal Society of Chemistry in Scotland and the University of Bristol in the UK interpreted the bog body experiments that a Professor Evershed conducted several years ago. Apparently, this professor buried modern fatty foods to find out how long the bog butter stuff takes to form. The obvious problem I see with this kind of experiment is that the results will not be available for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years from now. In my opinion, this seems pointless. Who wants to perform experiments if you don’t get to find out how they turn out because you would already be long dead?

A local farmer here in County Sligo dug up bog butter in 2007 when he was cutting turf on his property. He took it to a Connacht Gold creamery, which is where a brand of butter is made locally, and they later determined that that his bog butter was only 52% fat content compared with an 82% fat content in today’s standard butter. 30% less fat! Why is that? Were cows skinnier a long time ago? This is a serious question for a future bog butter expert like me to contemplate.

Like bottled water, perhaps bog butter could become the butter of choice in 2009 for the discerning, health-conscious individual? It would certainly, unlike some of the pork here in Ireland lately, be dioxin-free. And as far as entrepreneurship goes, if you think about it, this stuff is a gold mine. First, like spring water, it is already there. And, like spring water, it just has to be dug up. Of course it is a totally hit-or-miss kind of thing because there is no way of telling where bog butter is buried without actually bumping into it. Also, you cannot just go around digging in bogs looking for bog butter because bogs are protected by the Irish government. Maybe bog-butter sniffing dogs could be trained to smell it hundreds of feet under the turf? And then there are all the spin-off industries this ancient bog butter could create. I cannot think of any at this time, but I am sure someone will eventually.

Bog butter marketing would be tricky. Selling the idea of eating something that is at least hundreds, and possibly thousands of years old, would require some really sophisticated advertising. Certainly no taste tests, as the oldest bog butter goes back to the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago. Taking into account the fact that milk products were the main source of food for the Irish until the flight of the Earls and the collapse of the Gaelic order around 1700, butter was quite likely buried all over the bogs up until the end of the 17th century.

Just to let you know, I will be available for lectures and conferences as soon as my research is completed and I have been declared a bog butter expert by somebody somewhere. After that, you can contact me any time to schedule a bog butter talk. Please give me a few weeks notice though, because I have to read a few more articles about bog butter first.

Brenna Briggs is the author of the Liffey Rivers Irish Dancer Mystery Series. She lives in Sligo, Ireland, with her family.