It has always been part of my holiday canon, and when I was a kid, the idea of leprechauns and pots of gold really captured my imagination, and we would always have a green-dyed meal on March 17—rice, potatoes, pizza crust, eggs, etc. I would get mad at Easter stuff before St. Patrick's Day.
I have never quit liking St. Patrick's Day (it is a holiday, after all), but in college, I adopted a bit more cynical of an attitude. Why should we have a holiday that focuses on one specific culture, when we don't really pay attention to any other cultural holidays in the United States? I'm not Irish. (My latest ethnicity estimate has me at 11 percent Ireland and Scotland, and I think the bulk of that is Scotland.) And I abhor drinking. I honestly believe that our world will not get better as long as people turn to alcohol for recreation.
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| Truer words have never been spoken by an Old Navy ad. |
In more recent years, I have come to enjoy and even look forward to it. It has definitely surpassed Valentine's Day in my opinion. I think there's a couple of reasons.
First, I have moved beyond the kitschy leprechauns and food dye to actually doing more in the weeks leading up to Paddy's Day. Don't get me wrong; I love dressing in head-to-toe green, and I have been eating mint-, pistachio-, and lime-flavored foods all month.
But I have made a habit of listening to Irish or Irish-inspired music, reading Irish folk tales, and consuming Irish or Irish American food. I know that a lot of what passes as "Irish" is actually more American than anything (e.g. corned beef and cabbage), but I'm American, and we are celebrating an Irish American holiday, so I am 100 percent OK with Americanized things.
Yesterday (March 16), I didn't attend the St. Patrick's Day, but I stopped at the Siamsa after-party, which had live music from local Irish-inspired bands, Red Branch and Murphy & the Giant. They were on a stage that opened to an outdoor area at the Gallivan Center.
There was a little girl running around, probably between five and seven, who seemed a little...different. As the second band was setting up, she said, "Hey, you guys!" I didn't hear the whole conversation, but I think she asked if they wanted to see her dance. The fiddler said sure, and she did a little kid dance. Then the fiddler made a mistake by saying, "You'll have to dance when we start playing." Then, for the entire time the band was setting up, this girl was walking throughout the stage, behind the curtains, etc.
Once the band started, she was up on the stage doing her weird little dance. She had befriended two other little girls who were also dancing, but at least those two girls appeared to have had some actual Irish dance lessons, and they were not roaming among the band on the stage. Even as the band was playing their set, the weird girl was walking throughout the stage, talking to the drummer while he was playing. Where are this girl's parents?
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| The normal girls stayed on the side of the stage, but not the weird one. |
Then it got weirder. There was an older woman, old enough to have gray hair, who apparently had some mental disability, and she got up on the stage and began "dancing" next to the little girls! But her dancing was more like rhythmic stepping. I felt so uncomfortable with the awkwardness of the whole scene, and I wonder how embarrassed the band was. It was so weird. Oh, and at one point, the weird little girl came out and talked to all of us spectators—I couldn't understand what she said to me, but I think it had something to do with the oversized green T-shirt she had on, and the next thing I knew, she was on the stage again, with her green shirt in her hand (she had a white shirt underneath), and she swung it around and threw it off the stage, as though it was a striptease!
A few years ago at Barnes and Noble, I bought A Treasury of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, a collection of nineteenth-century folklore, and I have been reading a tale most nights before bed. Irish people get mad if you spell it "Patty's Day" instead of "Paddy's Day," and some of them also get mad that we use four-leaf clovers in the context of Ireland or St. Patrick's Day. I deduced that we Americans used four-leaf clovers because we already had them, and we connected them to shamrocks and the expression "Luck of the Irish." Again, I was fine with this—I'm an American, and in America, we celebrate St. Paddy's (not Patty's) Day with four-leaf clovers.
Well, in this book, I found reference to four-leaf shamrocks guarding against fairy and witch spells. So four-leaf clovers might have an Irish connection after all, even if it isn't as prevalent as we make it.
I think the other thing that has helped me appreciate St. Patrick's Day is having a broader context of American history and American holidays. I haven't really done any research into Ireland or the Irish diaspora, and I have done only minimal St. Patrick's Day research out of curiosity. But just being aware of other contexts has spilled over.
Years ago, the Salt Lake Tribune published an article claiming Utah is the least-Irish state. (Google and Facebook's search algorithms make it very hard to find, so I'm not linking to it here.) Our primary Irish connection is that the Union Pacific Railroad was built by Irish workers, and it was completed at Promontory Summit. It was hard to know about the Irish contribution to America because of where I live.
But now I am more aware of other things: George Washington declaring a St. Patrick's Day, the Irish Potato Famine that sent immigrants to the States, Irish immigrants influencing our Southern accent, Irish regiments in the Civil War. I even helped write a footnote about the Irish Troubles of the 1980s.
In my lifetime, it seems that St. Patrick's Day has gotten bigger, but it has mostly been the kitsch and drinking that have gotten bigger. Fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, it seems there was more interest in Irish culture in general and in St. Patrick himself, even if you weren't Catholic. Bing Crosby recorded many Irish American songs, but it's hard to imagine a mainstream star doing that today. (Ed Sheeran has a couple of Irish songs, but he's not American.)
Does St. Patrick's Day belong in the twenty-first century? After all, it might be considered a day of cultural appropriation and degrading stereotypes.
But I think it does belong. It wasn't that long ago that the Irish were a persecuted group in America and oppressed in their own land. Current events show that we're still struggling with accepting and embracing people and cultures who are different from us. St. Patrick's Day can show us how it's done.☘
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