While most kids look forward to Christmas, when I was a child, St. Patrick’s Day (along with Thanksgiving) was one of my favorite days of the year. It was a big day in my family usually involving going to the parade in New York and seeing family and friends we hadn’t seen in a while. Then there was the music, the stories of St. Patrick, the history of Ireland and the Irish in America. Growing up in a town where the dominant population was Italian-American, it also helped that there was one day a year where everyone wanted to be Irish. The element of pride was strong.
Things started to change when I moved to Virginia. If people celebrated St. Patrick’s day at all it was at a most superficial and sterotypical levely. Mostly it was just an excuse to get drunk. I thought St. Patrick’s Day would be better when I moved to Boston, but even in this most Irish of American cities I find the magic of my childhood lacking. I still look forward to St. Patrick’s Day but usually end up a little disappointed. Here are some things that contribute to my ambivalence:
- Wearing of the green – not bad in itself although some people really stretch the definition of green to include lime, chartreuse, olive drab and teal. Worse, they wear all those colors at once. I’m more perturbed by the self-imposed enforcers who critcize anyone in green. In years past I’ve worn sweaters made in Ireland thinking it more authentic, but there’s no pleasing the Green Team. Which brings me to:
- Pinching – Who came up with this crock? I lived 18-years in an Irish-American family interacting with Irish-American communities before I ever heard of the idea that you pinch people who don’t wear green when I started college. People act as if it’s some ancient Irish tradition, but I’m certain it’s a fairly recently innovation created to appeal to everyone’s inner sadist and I hope it goes away soon.
- Beads – It seems that wearing cheap plastic green beads is the thing to do these days on St. Patrick’s Day, even though it’s an obvious rip-off of New Orlean’s Mardi Gras. Granted, both holidays are about a month a part, have Catholic roots, and have a lot of revelry, but IIRC even in Mardi Gras the beads are a cheapening of a richer holiday tradition. Lets can this one too.
- 364 days a year, one can visit a pub in the greater Boston and hear a great performance of Irish music – traditional or contemporary – and meet interesting people while quaffing a tasty Irish beer. One day a year you can wedge yourself into an Irish pub with a bunch of drunken frat boys, listen to cheezy Oirish music and drink green-dyed Corona and pay a 20$ (or more) cover charge for the privilege. Guess which day this is?
- Danny Boy – once upon a time this was probably a lovely song, but these days this performance is not too far off the mark:
- Parades on St. Patrick’s day are a good way to celebrate the arts, culture, faith, and history of the Irish people but (in America at least) they are tainted by homophobia, militarism, and racism.
- The stupid t-shirts
Could be I’m just a grump. I’m cheered though that my wife brought home Dubliner cheese and Irish soda bread for supper which we enjoyed with (German) beer and (Italian) pasta. Then we danced to some Irish music with our little boy. I’ll need to find some new traditions to make St. Patrick’s Day as memorable for him as it was for me.
Previously:
Panorama of the Mountains 