MACHIAS – There was a Down East note to Sunday’s Christmas Eve concert on Irish public radio.

Brian Beal, an associate professor of marine biology at the University of Maine at Machias, lent his tenor voice to Cois Claddagh, a 25-member a cappella choir whose music was broadcast throughout Ireland.

Today, Beal, his wife, Ruth, and the couple’s two children will sit down to Christmas turkey and Irish plum pudding with their neighbors just outside Galway city.

The family has been in the west of Ireland since August, when Beal began a Fulbright scholarship working with scientists from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Shellfish Research Laboratory.

The researchers are trying to determine if hatchery-raised juvenile lobsters can survive in ocean cages by feeding off the algae and small marine organisms that wild lobsters eat.

If the experiment is successful, it means the Irish can grow larger lobsters for stock enhancement, without the intense labor and expense of hand feeding. And the larger lobsters will have a better chance of survival.

Beal said Saturday during a telephone interview that he checked the cages in the middle of November, and at least 70 percent of the tiny lobsters has survived, despite the storms that pounded Ireland’s western coast for almost two months straight Beal said it was a conversation with a fellow researcher that opened the door to his singing with Cois Claddagh.

Beal has sung in choirs and quartets since 1977, and he told the botanist he was looking for a similar opportunity in Ireland. The next day, the marine biologist who directs Cois Claddagh called Beal’s office at the University of Ireland, Galway, and invited him to the next night’s practice.

Beal passed the audition and learned the Irish words he would sing as one of the choir’s four tenors. RTE, Irish public radio, taped the choir singing in a church that was constructed in 1370, Beal said.

Ruth Beal said her husband’s invitation to join the choir is just one of the many ways in which the Irish have made the family feel welcome.

“The people here are just so wonderful” Ruth Beal said Saturday. “We’ve been invited for tea this afternoon, and we’re having Christmas dinner at our neighbor’s home.”

Despite rainy weather and temperatures that hover around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the holiday atmosphere is festive. Parties, at which guests are served small mincemeat pies and mulled wine, are constant, she said.

“And everybody has to have a Christmas cake,” Ruth Beal said. “It’s similar to a fruitcake, but they spread it with a layer of almond paste and decorate it with fluffy royal icing.”

A friend who knew how much they missed snow gave the Beals a Christmas cake decorated with snowflakes, she said.

Today’s dinner will be turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce and a ham with red cabbage, Beal said. And for dessert, there will be the traditional Irish plum pudding, which is a steamed pudding served with brandy butter and cream.

Area artists have painted the shop windows in Galway City, Ruth Beal said. The music shop has a Santa playing a banjo, and one lawyer’s office has a holly-laden policeman chasing someone with a Billy club.

“Some of them are very funny and they are all beautifully painted,” she said.

Downtown Galway is strung with Christmas lights, but very few Irish decorate the outside of their homes with lights, she said.

Ruth Beal said she learned from one of Ireland’s very interesting radio talk shows that Christmas trees weren’t part of the county’s holiday tradition until the 1960s when people began seeing them on American television.

“We took a drive down to Connemara the other night, and you could see trees inside people’s homes, but very few had lights on the outside,” she said. “The radio said that most people get their idea of how to decorate the outside of their houses from the movie ‘Home Alone.’ ”

The Irish do light their homes on Christmas Eve – by placing a candle in the window and letting it burn throughout the night.

“The candle is to guide Mary and Joseph to the stable and to let them know they would be welcome to stop at the home, ” she said.

Brian Beal said a friend to whom he’s been writing about Ireland recently observed that there appears to be more Christ in the Irish Christmas.

“I think that is true,” Beal said.

The couple’s two children attend an English-speaking school in Galway because the area where they live is right on the edge of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking region of western Ireland. The classes in their neighborhood school are taught in Irish, Ruth Beal said.

So, Hannah, 10, and Caleb,6, attend a small English-speaking school in Galway.

The children are learning some Gaelic, and Caleb was chosen to play Joseph in the school’s nativity play, the parents said.

The Irish postal service sends the country’s children a card from Santa with a postscript that made both parents laugh.

“P.S. Don’t forget to leave out a drink for Rudolph and me,” read Brian Beal.

Ruth Beal said their young neighbor, Aoife, told her and Hannah that it is traditional to leave Santa a piece of Christmas cake and a brandy.

“I told her Santa must really enjoy his visits to Ireland,” Beal said.