author
Marie Irish
Best known for lively early-20th-century holiday plays and school entertainments, this writer created cheerful, practical pieces meant to be performed by children and community groups. Her work still has an old-fashioned warmth that makes seasonal stories feel bright and welcoming.
2 Audiobooks
Christmas eve at Mulligan's
by Marie Irish
Christmas Speakin' at Skaggs's Skule
by Marie Irish
About the author
Marie Irish was a prolific American writer of dialogues, recitations, holiday pieces, and short plays for schools and community programs in the early 1900s. Surviving catalogs and library records connect her with titles such as The Days We Celebrate (1904), Catchy Comic Dialogues (1905), Good Things for Washington and Lincoln Birthdays (1914), and The Grade School Play Book (1929).
She seems to have specialized in writing material that was easy to stage and fun to read aloud, especially for children. Many of her best-known works center on celebrations and classroom performances, including Christmas Speakin' at Skaggs's Skule and Christmas Eve at Mulligan's, both of which have been preserved by Project Gutenberg.
Very little reliable biographical detail about her life was easy to confirm from major reference sources, but her long list of publications suggests a writer who was deeply attuned to schools, holidays, and everyday American family entertainment. Today, her books remain most interesting for their snapshot of popular amateur theater and festive storytelling from the early twentieth century.