Posted on March 19, 2006
Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!
We were quite fortunate this year — St. Patrick’s Day was on a Saturday. How opportune.
Surely St. Patrick would be glad that the traditional anniversary of his death fell on a weekend. Everyone is therefore free to meditate in somber remembrance of the patron saint of Ireland, a man who returned to the land that had enslaved him for six years as a missionary. That’s what everyone did, right?
As the saying goes, we were all a little Irish on Saturday. Unfortunately, that typically involves a chemical substance and lots of green food coloring.
The fact that an entire nationality has been reduced to Guinness and four-leaf-clovers is a story for another day (could anyone imagine Notre Dame having the “Fighting Welsh” or the “Irate Pakistanis” as their mascot?), for like most of our holidays, St. Patrick’s Day tells us more about ourselves than it does about our ginger neighbors across the ocean.
It’s easier not to think about it, but the vast majority our holidays are absolutely absurd, and tend to amount to cheap excuses for us to get plastered. St. Patrick’s Day is an excuse to drink an inappropriate amount of alcohol — as though we needed an excuse. We celebrate the Fourth of July, as “The Simpson’s” character Apu stated, by blowing up a small part of it (while we consume an inappropriate amount of alcohol). For Christmas, we put a conifer tree in our living room, throw electric lights at it and hang ugly-as-sin plastic and glass knick-knacks on it with skinny paper clips. And since we don’t celebrate the birth of Santa Claus — er, Christ —with an inappropriate amount of alcohol, we chase it a week later with New Year’s Eve, where we watch a garish glowing ball on a stick drop in Times Square and make up for the lost time.
St. Patrick’s Day, on the other hand, is chased with Easter, an equally absurd holiday without the alcohol. Unlike holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were arbitrarily placed on the calendar (we have no idea when in the year Christ was born, any more than we have a clue when the Native Americans made the fatal flaw to help the strange white men who came from across the sea), we know the events of Easter took place at Passover. A bit of credence can therefore be attributed to Easter, credence we immediately sacrifice on the altar of plastic eggs and little bunnies. We don’t (necessarily) get drunk during Easter weekend, but someone clearly was when they brainstormed how to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus.
So happy belated St. Patrick’s’ Day. We hope the day was as self-centered as any other holiday.
