A trip to Ireland may be out of reach this holiday season, but a Celtic celebration is closer than you think. The Hidden Valley Music Center presents the rip-roaring traditional Irish combo Molly’s Revenge on Saturday as part of a festive evening including singer and double-strung harp master Jesse Autumn and the Monterey Bay Pipe Band.

“There’ll be some storytelling too, an all-round fun show,” says Molly’s bouzouki player and lead vocalist Pete Haworth. “The music is a mixture of traditional Irish tunes that have nothing to do with Christmas necessarily, and Christmas music given a Celtic twist, played as jigs and reels.”

The band is celebrating the release of its new holiday album Yule Dance and is donating $5 of every CD sold to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation. The band has been a mainstay on the thriving Northern California Celtic music scene for the past six years or so, and has gained a national reputation for its hard-driving sound and relatively underexposed repertoire.

Haworth and David Brewer, who plays highland pipes, whistles, and bodhran, first met at Irish jam sessions around the Santa Cruz area. A last-minute cancellation by a Celtic band booked at the Santa Cruz Mountains roadhouse Henfling’s led to a gig, and Haworth and Brewer felt such a strong musical connection with the ad-hoc combo that the players decided to stick together.

“It was a one-off thing, but we decided we had a great time and to keep on doing it,” Haworth says, noting that the band’s moniker was a product of desperate necessity. “We had to come up with a name pretty quickly. It came out of the blue, and eventually we got so tired of people asking us about it and not having a good story. When our guitarist Stu Mason joined the band a few years ago, he wrote ‘The Saga of Molly’s Revenge’ about a goddess who falls in love with a human piper and ends up cursing him and all musicians. So now we have an answer.”

While the band’s personnel has changed a good deal since that first Henfling’s show, the current lineup has remained constant for more than two years (and is featured on the band’s excellent CD Raise the Rafters). The quartet’s most recent addition is fiddler John Weed, a Carmel Valley resident who’s performed widely around the West Coast in a variety of Irish bands, including the Chico Pub Scouts. What makes Molly’s Revenge such a blast is the group’s commitment to finding interesting material from throughout the Celtic world, with a particular emphasis on Cape Breton and Scottish piping tunes.

“There’s a central core of tunes that everybody plays, and that’s what gets played at sessions,” Haworth says. “A lot of the pubs want you to go in and play a lot of the well-known Irish beer-drinking tunes. Even though most of the tunes we play are Irish, one thing that sets us apart is the highland bagpipe tunes we do. David spent a lot of time digging out those, and spent a lot of time in Scotland learning the pipes from world-class players. He also brings in some tunes from Cape Breton. We try hard to find lesser-known stuff.”  

MOLLY’S REVENGE performs at 8pm on Saturday, Dec. 16, at the Hidden Valley Music Center, Carmel Valley Road and Ford Road, Carmel Valley, $25. 659-3115. mollysrevenge.com/performances.html.