Two Revelers Observe St. Patrick’s Day in Traditional Quiet & Religious Meditation
If you are anything like me you’ve spent a March 17th trying to figure out where you were and why you were wearing underpants on your head.
Pretty much since I arrived at college’s doorstep, St. Patrick’s Day meant wearing green and participating in a day of binge drinking in places where the most sober person sounded like Dudley Moore on his birthday.
Now, like most people who love tipping back a few pints and forgetting the world, I didn’t care why I was partying. St. Patrick’s Day was another excuse to let loose and accidentally booty call my ex-girlfriend’s younger brother.
But then I started wondering, what’s this St. Patrick’s Day all about? And then I did research and here are some truths about St. Patrick’s Day.
First off, it should be St. Maewyn’s Day. St. Patrick’s real name was not Patrick, but Maewyn. I can’t blame St. Maewyn; I’d have changed my name too if I were a Maewyn trying to get people to convert to an fledgling religion on a wet island.
Also Maewyn wasn’t Irish, but rather an English, Scottish, or Welshman kidnapped and enslaved by Irish marauders. But really, who doesn’t tell that story on St. Maewyn’s Day?
Maewyn (Patrick) didn’t rid Ireland of snakes. There are no snakes in Ireland now, and biologists believe that there never were. Most historians believe that “snakes” really mean “Celtic Pagans and Pagan practices.”
“Pagan practices” include feasts and orgies which were filled with food, drinking mead and wine, dancing, and singing. And this is funny, because it sounds like a modern-day St. Patrick’s Day celebration.
Man do I love it when things come full circle.
In fact, this is consistent with the origins of St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Originally, the day was “celebrated” by quiet observance and mass. It was so enforced that from 1900 until the 1970s, pubs in Ireland had to be closed on March 17th for “religious observance.”
This is what happens when you get rid of all the Pagans.
Nowadays, of course, we don’t go to church as much as we drink green beer until we turn green, then vomit green puke on our green shirts.
Oh yeah, it’s not green, but blue. We paint, dye, dress, drink, and eat everything green on St. Patrick’s Day, but back in the day, St. Patrick’s vestments were blue, so that is his traditional color.
Blue would seem a more appropriate color for St. Patrick the Buzz Kill, what with him driving all of the Pagans out of Ireland and forcing another day of church on all of us. Still, as I read about this, I thought back to all of the green shirts, green hats, buttons, boxers, and socks I have bought over the years.
My whole life has been a lie in green.
None of this will stop me from going to a pub on Thursday, March 17th, and having a few Guinness. And it shouldn’t stop you either, but won’t it be nice to have a few St. Patrick’s Day facts to annoy fellow revelers?
But for the love of Maewyn, try to find some Pagans and have fun.
