An event to remember those who are no longer with us will take place in West Tipp over the festive period.
A Remembrance Evening will be held in the Plan in Tipperary Town on New Year’s Eve with people asked to bring a tealight candle and leave it on the footpath leading towards the Bandstand in memory of a loved one.
The event is organized by Light Up the Plan for Christmas who have been responsible for decorating the Plan for the past 4 years, bringing some much needed festive cheer to the West end of Tipperary Town.
Local councillor and member of Light Up the Plan, Anne Marie Ryan Shiner said that the event is quite a personal one and though the official start time is at 5pm, people are welcome to leave a candle at any time that suits them:
What we do is every year we have a remembrance evening on New Year’s Eve and it starts kind of about 5 o’clock, but its’s a very personal event, people just come along themselves at whatever time they want, but usually around 5 o’clock and they lay a tealight on one of the paths leading towards the Bandstand in memory of a loved one. So it’s kind of more of an individual event, it’s not a big event and people come and go as evening goes so it’s quite a quiet, spiritual event I think really.
She went on tp say that New Year’s Eve can be bittersweet and said it seemed fitting to hold the remembrance evening on that date:
I suppose Christmas is a time where we all miss people. Nearly all of us in Light Up the Plan have experience of missing people or missing someone in our family and we felt it was just a very nice way to mark it. Yeah we’ve been doing it right from the start I think so yeah, New Year’s Eve I suppose is a difficult evening, it’s a lovely evening in a lot of ways but it’s kind of a sad one as well at times, so I think it felt like a natural fit for that evening.
