St. Patrick’s Day is one of the highly cherished holidays for my mom’s side of the family. When you wake up on the seventeenth of March, you better put some article of green clothing on right away or else someone might come up and pinch you in that brief period of time that you lounge in your pajamas. Every year from family members, I hear the story about the reason we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day: St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland by getting them to follow him and his flute. Apparently, before that Ireland had had a serious problem with snakes. They were just everywhere terrorizing the people of Ireland.
My grandpa on my mother’s side is an immigrant from Belfast, Ireland. He spent the first seven years of his life living in Belfast while his mom was taking care of her sick aunt. It rubbed off on him, and he has a lot of Irish pride and pronounces some things differently. For example, he says “warsh” instead of “wash.” Because of this, my grandpa is the most spirited of all when it comes to St. Patrick’s Day.
Every year my grandpa makes sure to have a St. Patrick’s Day party where he invites all of his family friends. After a while, my aunt started following the same tradition. For most of my life, my aunt invited family members and all her close friends over for a potluck party on the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day. To prepare for this, my grandpa stows away to the kitchen to bake up four loaves of Irish Soda Bread. “Each Irish family has a different way of making soda bread,” he shared with me once as I helped him bake. “My grandmother used to bake a couple loaves everyday and she would make sure to always have soda bread or tea ready incase we had any guests over.” After the guests start arriving, my grandpa occupies himself with making Irish coffees for all the adults, while putting some away himself. And yes, they are alcoholic — very.
Most of the people my aunt invited to the St. Patrick Day celebrations were middle aged friends of hers with little kids. All the boys would congregate and connive on how to terrorize the similarly aged girls. The children would run around making noise while the adults mingled and laughed and ignored them. St. Patrick’s Day in Irish families is not just a celebration of heritage, but an excuse to bring people together. Irish people put a huge emphasis on family and that can be shown in an authentic Irish St. Patrick’s Day celebration. There’s never a St. Patrick’s Day party where people are in a bad mood or feeling excluded. Everyone is amiable and ready to engage in conversation—maybe due to the large amounts of Irish coffees being consumed—and you can hear laughter from every room you walk into.
The moral of this story is, you don’t need to dye your hair green and drink alcohol until you puke in order to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. A much more authentic way you can celebrate is by surrounding yourself with people you care about and concocting some traditional Irish dishes like corn beef and cabbage or Irish soda bread. St. Patrick’s Day is really all about being with people who you are close with because doing that reflects the Irish values of family and hospitality.
