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A message from Shannon Brigid Colleen O’Lazzaro
By JILLIAN LAZZARO, Staff write
Wed Mar 12, 2008, 12:39 PM EDT
I've always liked St. Patrick's Day. It may be a surprise, because if you care to study the name below the title of this column, you'll discover that no "mc, "o," or "fitz" festoons my surname, and though somewhere down the line, probably my mother's great-great grandfather, someone probably boarded a boat from Ireland, it hasn't awarded me with the Irish-ness that being an O'Lazzaro would. Still, as I was growing up, St. Patrick's Day always held a strange allure for me. Perhaps it was the tradition of wearing green, which adults always said was in honor of the Emerald Isle, where I imagined Oz's Emerald City was located. But I'm almost certain that my imagination ran wild when the importance of St. Patrick was explained to me. That first time someone told me that St. Patrick had driven all the snakes from Ireland, my young mind filled with the image of a medieval Crocodile Hunter, wearing chain mail over his signature khaki shorts and wrestling with Ireland's snakes. A decade later, St. Patrick's Day still inspires thoughts of Steve Irwin.
Eventually, I learned that the whole celebration, the corned beef and cabbage, the wearing green, the clovers, and St. Patrick's place in history didn't have a definite history, though there were many legends. First there was the theory that St. Patrick led an extremely bloody war against Ireland's trespassers, and then the story that he raised peasants from the dead. Another piece of Irish lore places St. Patrick on a hilltop with staff in hand, reciting what must have been one amazing sermon, for it supposedly converted the entirety of Ireland to Christianity.
Like me, most people claim St. Patrick drove all the snakes from Ireland; But fewer people actually know that snakes are not indigenous to Ireland. Some know that the snakes were actually the pagans that represented the majority of Ireland's population. Over the years, the truth has come out about St. Patrick, who was, dare I say it, actually not Irish. The Welsh peasant, so moved by his own conversion at the age of 16, took on the daunting task of converting all of the inhabitants of Ireland. In actuality, St. Patrick may have been history's ultimate missionary.
Today, the more traditional celebrations of the holiday feature the day spent in spiritual renewal and a chance to offer prayers to missionaries abroad. But, perhaps in St. Patrick's style of excluding no one from his blessings, St. Patrick's Day has become an international holiday, celebrated in Germany, Argentina, Japan, Russia, and Singapore; celebrated by even the Irish, the partially-Irish, and even the non-Irish.
While most holidays are punctuated by stoic affairs and quiet time of contemplation, St. Patrick's Day, represents a chance to indulge in childish fancies. When else in the year can we get away with dying hair, beer, and even rivers and streams green? What other holiday is represented by a mascot as whimsical as a leprechaun? When else is it normal to wish for a rainbow and a pot o' gold? While other holidays stress tolerance, thanks, and promises, St. Patrick's Day takes the responsibility out of our hands, and once in the year, we can celebrate a holiday that stresses plain old luck.
