I’m dreaming of a green St. Patrick’s Day, just like the ones I used to know.
We wish you a Merry St. Patrick’s Day, we wish you a Merry St. Patrick’s Day, we wish you a Merry St. Patrick’s Day, and the day after, too!
Good St. Patrick-slaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen.
It’s beginning to look a lot like St. Patrick’s Day, everywhere you go.
He’s making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice. St. Patrick is coming to town.
In this most Irish of American cities, there is an awful lot (emphasis on the awful) of hoopla around St. Patrick’s Day, most of it associated with a wee drop-een, a jar or two, the juice of the barley, as every “Irish” pub in the city, and there are an awful lot (emphasis mostly on the awful) of them, rolls out the green, soon to be puked on, carpet.
It may not be as big a deal as Christmas, but it’s right up there – far surpassing Halloween and The Glorious 4th - as the holiday for which Boston goes all out in the most crass and loutish sense possible.
Me? I will dig out my shamrock earrings. And wear a green sweater. If I get ambitious, I’ll bake soda bread.
But that’s about the extent of it.
I’m saving thoughts-Irish for my upcoming (May) trip to Galway. This will be our first trip to Ireland since 2006, well before the Celtic Tiger had been bagged, its head stuffed and mounted for all the world to see. Last time we were there, real estate madness reigned supreme. Construction – much of it shoddy appearing slap-up jobs – was going on everywhere. Even the cab drivers were gabbing about housing costs – mean row houses in Limerick, a dump of a town if ever, were supposedly going for hundreds of thousands of pounds. The country was packed with EU immigrants, largely from Eastern Europe. And the Irish were enjoying the fact that, for the first time since the Danes and the Normans long-boated to Ireland, people were shipping into Ireland, not out.
All this has been spectacularly reversed, of course.
And as used as the Irish are to misery, poverty, and doing with out, a lot of them had gotten pretty used to being able to have their children stay in their country of birth, rather than to have them go off and seek their fortunes in the US, in England, in Australia, and throughout the EU.
Now changed utterly.
A nation once again of out-migration.
Sad.
Still, our trip is something I am much looking forward to.
The countryside will be beautiful. The weather in May should be grand. There will no doubt be plenty of places to get brown bread and salmon. We’ll catch up with friends. And I will hoist a pint (or two) of Guinness – pretty much the only time I drink anything beer-ish, but Guinness in Ireland is unbelievably good.
Anyway, Happy St. Patrick’s Day. (Or Happy St. Paddy’s Day. But puhl-eeze, never in céad mille years, Happy St. Patty’s Day.)
Slán for now.
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Here are my earlier St. Patrick Day posts – all pretty good, if I do say so meself – but I’ll let yez be the judge.
2010: St. Paddy’s Day No More We’ll Keep.
2009: Irish Eyes Not So Smiling These Days.
2008: You Say Po-tay-to, I say Po-tah-to. Who’s Irish and Who’s Not.
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