If you play the pipes, highland or uillean, or know someone who does, you'll want to check out this notice from The Gathering Festival. They are offering chances for those who like to play pipes around the kitchen table rather than in formal pipe band situations opportunities to step out and play at one of homecoming year's biggest festivals. Kitchen pipers, read on for what the festival organizers have to say...

"The pipes, the pipes are calling...

In five minutes in Glasgow city center, you will very likely hear five different languages spoken, and English with accents from five different regions of Scotland as well.

People from all over the world come to the small city across the Charles River from Boston to work, study, create, and among other things, enjoy the hundreds of restaurants which offer cuisines from Ethiopian to Mexican, priced in ranges for high dollar spenders, families on an outing, and grad students on tight budgets. High end Henrietta’s Table and student friendly Bartley’s Burger Cottage make all the guidebooks, but there are other great choices, too.

Ontario, in eastern Canada, is a musical melting pot when it comes to traditional music, taking influences from settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Hungary, and Germany, to name but a few, along with music from the First Peoples who lived in the area before all those folk came along. It’s also a musical crossroads within Canada, for the country sounds of the plains to the west, Quebecois nearby, and Cape Breton to the east.

December in Ireland and Scotland is time of short days, long nights, rain, wind, snow, sleet, and the occasional clear day with sparlikng sun or frosty night filled with an extravagance of stars.

Making your list, checking it twice -- whether that’s for Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Solstice, or a host and hostess gift for the many gatherings of this season, music is always a good gift, one