Concert promoters helped infuse the members of Cherish the Ladies with the Christmas spirit.

Joanie Madden, a whistle and flute player who founded the Celtic music band, remembers getting a call from a promoter about a dozen years ago.

He asked her if the band had a Christmas show.

"I said, 'Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we got a great Christmas show,'" Madden says during a telephone interview. "I hung up the phone and I called up the girls and said, 'We got to get a Christmas show together.'"

Cherish the Ladies, which Friday will bring its Christmas show to York's Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center, has been spreading holiday cheer ever since.

About seven years ago, Madden got another call from a promoter.

"People kept asking us, 'Where's your Christmas album?'" Madden says. "We didn't have one and the next year they were really hounding us, 'Where's your Christmas album?'

"Finally, I got a call from a promoter, who said, 'Don't show up without a Christmas album.'"

It was early November and Madden, a first-generation Irish-American, took the words to heart.

All the recording studios she contacted were booked, however, so she rented a baby grand piano, wheeled it into her home in New York and invited her band mates over to record a Christmas album.

The band finished the album, called it "On Christmas Night" (2004), and sold it at gigs and from the back of their bus.

A copy wound up in the hands of the head of Rounder Records, a Massachusetts record label, and he was so smitten with it that his company contracted to distribute it.

Spontaneity and serendipity have always played a role in the 25-year history of Cherish the Ladies, which includes Madden, Mary Coogan on guitar, Mirella Murray on accordion, Kathleen Boyle on piano and Grainne Murphy on fiddle.

The band got its start when its original members were thrown together as part of a concert series aimed at showcasing the best female Celtic musicians in New York City.

"When we first started," Madden says, "people thought we were a marketing ploy, like we were something like the Spice Girls, a vehicle to sell albums. That was never the case. We got together as a fluke concert series and never imagined people would like it so much."

Since then, Cherish the Ladies, which has helped launch the solo careers of top-notch Celtic players such as fiddlers Eileen Ivers and Winifred Horan, bodhran player Cathie Ryan and singer Heidi Talbot, has played all over the world and released 15 albums.

The band recorded its latest album, "Country Crossroads," in Nashville with the help of some great musicians living in and around that city. Guests include Vince Gill, who turns in a wonderful vocal on "Donegal Rain," singer Nanci Griffith, banjo player Alison Brown and dobro player Rob Ickes. Ivers also plays on the album.

"I never thought in my wildest dreams I would have the opportunity to have a house and travel the world playing a pennywhistle," says Madden, who also is an in-demand session player. "We learned as we went along.

"The first year, I didn't speak into the microphone. I wouldn't talk. Now you can't shut me up."

Madden's love of Celtic music stems from her father, an Irish immigrant who was a professional accordion player.

"I grew up in a musical household and my story is the same as the rest of the band," she says. "Everybody was in the same situation. All of our dads played music and it was passed down to us through osmosis, I guess."

Cherish the Ladies

Friday at 7:30 p.m. $22-$38

Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center, 50 N. George St., York

846-1111. www.strandcapitol.org