The Christmas Candle
My mother recently shared with me the excitement she felt as a child when her family prepared for Christmas.
She grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Connemara, in a rural seaside village, not far from where I grew up, called Moyrus, beyond the village of Cárna, in the heart of the Gaeltacht- an Irish-speaking community on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.
She remembers the house freshly whitewashed, fresh white sand spread in the driveway. Everything seemed to be glistening, white like snow. Then they would light the candle in the window. She still remembers the sense of wonder it filled her with. She still lights a candle in the window at Christmas to this day.
My mother as a teenager outside her childhood home, Moyrus, Cárna Connemara.
The Christmas Candle Tradition
The Irish word for candle is coinneal. It was a common tradition to light the candle at Christmas and place it in the window. It was a gesture both simple and profound. At Christmas time, particularly on Christmas Eve, a candle placed in the front window of an Irish home becomes an offering of welcome. Its flame speaks quietly to passersby: there is warmth here, there is shelter, there is a place for you.
Rooted in Ireland’s Christian heritage, this light once symbolised the way being lit for the Holy Family, with the youngest member of the household entrusted to ignite the Coinneal Mhór na Nollaig, “the Big Christmas Candle”.
This tradition was powerfully reawakened by former Irish President Mary Robinson, who lit a candle in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin (The President's House) as a gesture to those forced to leave Ireland’s shores.
Her words, “there will always be a light on…for our exiles and our emigrants”.
A Bridge Between Generations
In a world where Ireland’s five million residents are mirrored by an estimated eighty million people of Irish descent scattered around the globe, the candle becomes a counterpoint to dispersion. The Greek root of the word diaspora, meaning “to scatter,” finds its answering image in the steady flame that refuses to go out. It speaks not only to those living far from home, but also to ancestral lines marked by rupture, famine, colonisation, and loss—histories carried quietly in the psyche and body. The light is lighting for your return home.
From a depth psychology perspective, the coinneal carries archetypal resonance. Light has long symbolised consciousness, hope, and the enduring presence of the Self amid darkness.
In the quiet glow of the Christmas candle, we encounter an image of the inner home—a psychic centre that remains intact even through separation, exile, or loss.
The flame becomes a bridge between generations—those who have longed for their homeland or an ancestral way of life, something that holds deep symbolic meaning in our psyche and spirit—illuminating the continuity of identity across time. It reassures us that something essential has been preserved by our ancestors and entrusted to us, even if it arrives threaded with grief, silence, or longing.
To turn toward the flame is to enter into relationship with those who came before, allowing what was unfinished or unspoken to be seen and gently tended.
The Home & Hearth
This image of the inner home is closely related to another ancient Irish symbol: the teallach, the hearth. In traditional Irish life, the hearth was the heart of the home—the place of warmth, nourishment, storytelling, and communal presence. It was where ancestors were remembered, where wisdom was passed on through story and where the dead were never far from the living.
I named my website teallach.com almost 10 years ago, when I began my Deepening the Senses work. I named it Teallach with this symbolism in mind, envisioning it as a space of belonging where inner and ancestral stories can be honoured. Psychically, the hearth represents the inner fire around which fragmented parts of the self—and fragments of ancestral memory—can gather, warm, and begin to heal through presence and witnessing.
This understanding lies at the heart of my approach to depth psychology in this work. By cultivating inward connection—through sensation, image, metaphor, symbols and the wealth of Irish folklore, mythology and embodied awareness—we begin to light our own inner coinneal and tend our inner teallach.
These practices offer a way of listening not only to the personal psyche, but to the ancestral currents that move through us. In doing so, we discover that home is not something we must find elsewhere or earn through striving; it is something we remember and restore. The candle does not force the way—it simply shines, guiding us—along with those who walk behind us—gently home to ourselves.
May I wish you all a very sheltering, good and kind Christmas. May the candle light brightly at your own hearthstone, and may I say, míle buíochas “thousand thank yous” for your presence and company this past year.
I am so very grateful to you.
Grá agus Beannacht
Eileen
