St. Patrick's Day. The thing I love about the holiday is that -- like Christmas and Mardi Gras -- it's a holiday ostensibly rooted in Christian tradition (with holdovers from good ol' fashioned ancient paganism meshed in), yet has come to be epitomize night time debauchery -- bacchanals lit with shots, beer and Irish pubs.
And why not, I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints any day. St. Patrick's Day -- like so much of Americana -- is a dichotomous blending of the sacred and profane. St. Patrick's Day isn't quite as American as the 4th of July, but it's damn close. I mean firecracker lust and shot glass to the lips close. America is nothing, if not multicultural -- a technicolor amalgamation of every race, culture and religion that ever immigrated here. I believe there were more Irish-Americans than there were Irish in Ireland as early as the Guilded Age.
The easy, non-puritanical, non-Austere approach of St. Patrick's Day was really in the mix from the beginning. When St. Patrick was converting the inhabitants of the emerald isle back in the 5th century, he was cool with the converts keeping their native polytheism, their Druidic mythologies and letting them co-exist with the Catholicism he introduced. He was fine with the natives mixing their pagan sun cross with the cross of Jesus to create a celtic cross. It's not clear if he really used a shamrock as a metaphor for the holy trinity, but who cares? He did not actually drive the snakes out. That much, we do know for a certainty.
But the inclusion of Irish and many other cultures in America has sure driven out a lot -- definitely not all -- bigotry, hasn't it?
As a young small town newspaper reporter, I took a photo of a priest who hailed from Ireland, as he was blessing a beer keg in the kitchen of a local brasserie called O'Dells. He poured holy water on that thing and prayed earnestly, thanking God for this gift of the barley and the "good cheer" it brought to peoples' lives.
My jaw about collapsed. I was brought up Baptist, raised to believe Jesus turned the water into Welch's Grape Juice. (Remember the scene in My Left Foot? Right after leaving a funeral, Daniel Day Lewis -- loved Lincoln -- and his family, not only go to a pub, they get into a brawl, a donnybrook.)
Well I'm not going to convert over some non-written, tacit doctrine on beverages. Although Catholicism might go back in my family somewhere and somebody probably married a Protestant and went heretical. I say this because there's definitely Irish in my heritage. Genealogists discovered it in our family tree. My mother's maiden name was McElroy.
Years ago, my co-workers and I used to celebrate "good cheer" at our favorite neighborhood dive every St. Patrick's Day. It wasn't an Irish pub, but so what. The spirit was there. No signs for Guinness outside the door. Just working class old man beers like Old Milwaukee and Schlitz.
