It's Not About THE HAIR!

Welcome to Our Little Irish Corner of the Web!

Walking with my daughter at any venue we're performing at, all we hear is 'look at the HAIR!" or "WOW! Curls!" or " Is that their real hair?" and "Wow, so much hair for little girls".

I always want to stop and answer each one of those comments, but obviously when you are performing, or moving the kids in a parade and handing out throws to the kids, you can't.

What I want to say is 'it's not about the hair.

It's about honor, respect and tradition. To which I'm sure I would get some blank looks.

Thanks to popularity of Riverdance, most people do not realize what Irish dance is at it's basic and everyday level.

And that is where this blog comes in.

We're 3 Irish dance moms, who decided we needed to get those thoughts about what Irish Dance means to OUR kids out there, to combat the misconceptions and the stereotypes.

And like any cultural activity, there are ways of doing things, of dressing, terminology and correctness, that new parents will always crash into like proverbials bulls in china stores. So we thought, why not share what we learned, and are still learning, in our 3 years in, in a way that is easy for us to share with EVERYONE, and those researching out info.

And this blog was formed.

And because we always get asked about the Poodle Socks second, after the hair, our blog name pretty much found itself!

Why Poodle Socks?

Back to tradition!

Back in Ireland, girls wore their Sunday best to perform in, and that included white cotton socks. You know the ones that were HARD to clean, so they were saved for special days. All was fine until WWII and cotton got scarcer and wool was the alternative. But if you've worn wool, you know it can be scratchy. Lore has it that one inventive lady added some poodle hair to the wool she was weaving and got a much softer sock. The poodles were abundant, so their hair was added to the wool socks, and the dancers once again had socks to wear. And a name was born. Even after the switch was made back to cotton, the weavers kept the bumby weave from the wool poodle socks, and the name stuck on. So there you go.

History, ingenuity, and tradition rolled into one!

Pretty much how Irish Dancing has evolved.

So stay with us as we share different things we've learned and fun things for Irish Dancers!