Facts about St Patrick

Okay, folks, not to pour green rain on your St Patrick's Day parade, but we need to point out a few things. The shamrock-toting, green-wearing, green-beer-drinking, parading St Paddy's Day we hear about is not an authentic Irish celebration. Oh, Ireland celebrates the man, for sure, but our forebears celebrated it as a full-on church-going day like Easter. It wasn't until people of Irish extraction started coming over from America and expecting something big that things changed. Be sure of this: If you see a St Paddy's Day parade in Ireland, it's a tourist thing.

So as you hoist 16-fluid-ounce pints of dyed lager, remember that as traditions go, it's Irish-American, not Irish. (And there's one significant difference: Irish pint pots contain 20 fluid ounces...and are filled with very dark brown liquid.)

Not that Irish-American traditions are a bad thing, of course, but because Easterween is an Anglo-Irish-Scottish-Italian-American-with-a-smattering-of-other-nationalities collective, we're very particular about sourcing our traditions.

Now if this blog hasn't been enough to get your Irish up, here are a few other Paddy facts:

1. St Patrick was English. He was born near the river Severn around 389 AD, around the time that the Roman Empire abandoned Britain, and lived there till he was 16.

2. He wasn't naturalized as an Irishman. He was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold as a slave in County Antrim.

3. He got his freedom--and religion--in France. At the age of around 22, he escaped from his captors to Gaul. There he became a priest and had a dream...to go back to the country that enslaved him and give them a dose of that old-fashioned religion. Only it was new-fangled at the time.

4. He wasn't a snake wrangler. There were no snakes in Ireland at the time. The snake was a symbol (kinda like the 6 days of creation in Genesis). Snakes meant evil (cross reference to the Garden of Eden in Genesis). Patrick drove the evil out of Ireland, not yer actual slithering things.

5. His signature color was blue, not green. All the stained-glass windows in Ireland made before 1800 had Patrick dressed in blue. Even the shamrock he used to demonstrate what the Trinity was all about was often made of blue glass. Green only became associated with Paddy around 1800, when he was adopted during an Irish uprising as a symbol of the country. Another symbol of the uprising was the green uniform worn by the rebels.

...and on that note, happy St Paddy's to you all. We'll also be hoisting one in celebration. But it'll be dark brown, not dyed green.