By SHELAGH BRALEY STARR
RELATED☘️ Staff
What do My Ireland Box founder Katharine Keane and the Jolly Old Elf have in common? Both have workshops overflowing with holiday joy.
But there are differences. One is that Keane’s Dingle headquarters stays busy all year long, shipping off thousands of specially curated boxes of Irish products to those who long for the Emerald Isle.
And the other, Keane points out: Santa can’t deliver dúchas.
“It’s dúchas,” she said in Irish, “to do with your connection to your ancestors. Wherever you feel drawn to it, whether it’s a trait, a mannerism, any connection to the people and the places who went before you—that’s the dúchas, your connection to Ireland.”
The gift box founder said she met so many travelers at her family’s bed & breakfast who felt that bond and were heartbroken to leave Ireland.
“I totally see that they (ancestry-seekers who travel to Ireland) are Irish. These people who just loved coming to Ireland, they couldn’t believe they were in the land of their ancestors,” she recalled. She said she felt compelled to help keep them connected to country and culture any way she could.
She found that way early in 2013, when curated subscriptions like BirchBox, MyBlueApron, and BarkBox were a novelty. Keane was busy working in law then, when she and her husband were expecting their first child.
“Around that time, I read in The New York Times about this new kind of business, this subscription, BirchBox. I woke up in a half-dream, and all of a sudden, I thought of sending a BirchBox-style connection to those people, to feel like they’re part of Ireland. I could send them a box of surprises from Ireland, I thought.”
Keane found those surprises at her first craft show in 2013. “It was huge, in Dublin. We met a wood turner who made bottle stoppers. There were Learning Irish books for kids, felt coasters … I remember a lot of those products,” she said. Once the first gifts were chosen, the boxes began their journey from Keane’s home base in Dingle to subscribers in the United States and Canada, and then the operation took off from there.
She’s quick to credit her team for the growth of the company over the past 12 years, naming her husband as especially crucial to their success.
“Thomas, my husband, helped me—he has been there all the way through. He had his own job, now he works with me full time. I was trying to do (My Ireland Box), up at night midnight, answering customer service emails, it was a real juggle. And yes, we’d be packing the boxes ourselves. We used to pack them in a room in the bed and breakfast.”
Luckily, they no longer do packing and distribution at home, so Keane can be more selective, mindfully choosing unique quality products, even designing jewelry, a cap, and a calendar of photos she takes herself. “That way, I can put my own mark on it. When I design something, it becomes unique, it’s not on every shelf.”
The curation for the boxes, numbering in the hundreds of thousands since the beginning, has evolved as well.
“From looking at what I liked, what would go well with the theme, what I could get, to the best thing I ever did—what do want more of?—my own customers gave me loads of ideas. Once I heard from them, I could go off and say (to artisans), ‘Can you make me this?’ It meant I was giving them (customers) more of what they want.”
For Keane, My Ireland Box is a way of staying rooted in the history and culture that means so much to her, especially in her beloved Dingle, “soaked in tradition.” Dingle is one of those magical places in Ireland where the old ways have survived and even thrived, she said. But that does not translate into any gatekeeping—she wants to share those traditions. And she dismisses the idea that anyone should feel less than Irish when they travel to seek their heritage.
She said dúchas is the answer to the question so many of the travelers she’s met ask: Why do I feel so connected to Ireland?
She described it as a natural draw to the land and people, that inexplicable sense of belonging somewhere they’ve never been before, that so many talk about after they travel to Ireland. “It answers so many questions about ‘Why do I feel this way about Ireland?’ It’s because the roots go so deep, and they’re always there. I identified that, I discovered it,” Keane said.
That is what she wanted to help keep alive, whether her customers had come to Ireland and returned home or hadn’t yet landed on Irish soil.
“I share the true Ireland that I see here in Dingle—the landscapes, the traditions that are still alive,” she said. “The traditions are still here, and I’m passionate about them. That’s what I want people to know. That’s what I love writing about.”
Each package of My Ireland Box includes a special booklet, written each month by Keane herself, where she shares these thoughts, stories, songs, recipes, and more. She takes great care to write the booklet, which has expanded to as much as 60 pages.
She delves headlong into her research each month, giving true accounts of what once was, connecting her customers to Ireland now, helping them understand what matters to her and so many others. “I dive into stories about what used to happen in the past. We truly are full of tradition (in Dingle). It’s still part of our way of life—the music, the culture, I am so into all of that.”
She pointed to how likely it is to have song break out in a local pub: “sean nós, the old Irish songs,” she said. “We still meet in the pub or in someone’s cottage and sit by the fire and sing songs. We still have that. We still have Wrenboys here.”
Wrenboys play a vital role in one of Ireland’s oldest traditions, celebrated in Dingle and some other rural spots on Dec. 26 (St. Stephen’s Day in Ireland), involving groups parading through town in curious masks made of straw and colorful costumes. They are accompanied by bands playing music, and they collect money for charities. It’s an ancient tradition, one that traces its roots back to honoring the wren, known in history as the king of birds. These are the kinds of traditional stories she shares.
“I literally would spend two days writing the book. Some of them become more special than others. I put 20 pages in a word document, and I send it to Edwin (the designer) with the photos. Sometimes I finish that and I’m thinking, I just loved that so much. I come away from it feeling like it was a proper tour that I brought our members on. Nobody else can re-create that, anything that makes them feel they’ve been transported to Ireland,” she said.
And then suddenly, the tour-from-a-distance became a gratifying surprise: welcoming a group of customers for a visit.
“They said, imagine if we came to Dingle? And they came, I didn’t even organize it,” she said, a smile curling around her dark eyes. “The subscribers came to meet me, about 17 of them, wearing t-shirts that said My Ireland Box.”
So what did she do?
She took them on a real-life tour. “Here I was, on this huge bus, with my microphone,” she laughed.
It meant something special for her to meet them in person. “For them to say to me, you don’t understand what your box does for me each month.” She smiled. “It was just amazing, to spend two whole days with them and show off all we talk about in our books. Well, it felt very real, and I had built something that wasn’t just virtual. We were building community. That was, for me, a great thing.”
She may not have reindeer, but Keane does have “elves,” and her reach into other lands is no less magical.
“It’s lovely,” she said, “I just have to give our packing team so much credit.”
If you want to open a box of Ireland’s special gifts for yourself, you’ll be in for a new year’s surprise full of culture and learning. In her monthly letters and with the curated gifts, she’s sharing seasonal insight and how Irish people of the past took it all in.
“I like to talk about what’s happening in nature in Ireland. I am walking here and seeing the beautiful wildlife. (I want customers to know) what our ancestors used to admire about Ireland when the seasons were changing,” Keane said.
“It’s really important to go back in time and learn what we used to do in the past. I want them to know what’s true here.”
NOTE: New subscriptions to MyIrelandBox ship out the beginning of the month after you subscribe, so any December orders will receive the January box.
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