St. Patrick's Day: it's deeper than you thought.

 St. Patrick's Day evokes a lot of cultural cliches - leprechauns, Kiss Me I'm Irish!, shamrocks, pots of gold, and those poor kids getting pinched at school because they didn't wear green. Oh, those poor, poor greenless children.

We all know that it celebrates St. Patrick (duh) and that it's been observed as a religious holiday in Ireland for over thousands of years. When the holiday came to America, commercialism had nothing to do with it. Quite the contrary: the first St. Patrick's Day parade was held in the streets of New York City by Irish soldiers serving in the British military in 1762. The parade was an expression of their Irish patriotism, something that made them feel closer to home. Their nostalgic celebration is positively endearing to a genealogical researcher like myself. 

A lot of people love to hate these kinds of holidays, citing them as Hallmark Holidays: commercial and devoid of any real meaning that once existed. Even though I agree that certain companies are dependent upon our enthusiasm to keep these holidays alive, we only have ourselves to blame! Frankly, there aren't enough nationwide celebrations! Thanks to our own festive nature, we have National Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day and Shark Week (or, the best week to watch Craig Ferguson.)

There's a holiday that never stuck out to me until this year: St. Patrick's Day. The Irish hardly care about this day at all, so why celebrate it? Because it's not an Irish holiday, per se: it's an American holiday. Our country has millions of descendants of Irish immigrants in our melting pot and St. Patrick's Day may be the one day a year that we pause to consider about our own nations of origin.

One of my coworkers has the opinion that Americans aren't necessarily Euro-UK-Asia-African-Oceanic "mutts". She said, even though we're not all cross-cultural mutts, we're all essentially Americans. I struggled with this thought at first, but then it made total sense. It's our diversity that makes us Americans! Our nation has a remarkable history, and perhaps as Americans we're actually citizens of Earth. This is something we should be proud of. Celebrating our diverse background should be a part of our individual patriotism.

For one day a year, even for a fleeting moment, we ponder our heritage and engage in the conversation of genealogy. We connect with each other subconsciously when we talk about heritage, Irish or not, and that's a uniquely American experience.

So lets have more conversations! Lets find more reasons to celebrate the cultures and the people that brought us here!