A LUCKY ST. PATRICK'S DAY

Kiss me, I’m Irish today! Green donuts. Green beer. Green bagels. (Oy vey!)
Maybe a chorus of “Danny Boy.”
For a lot of Americans, that’s a typical Saint Patrick’s Day.
Whether you’re Irish – for the day – or not, it’s mostly a celebration of how we think of the Irish: a poetic and musical people who like the color green and know how to party.
Which…yeah.
But Americans have been observing Saint Patrick’s Day since before they were Americans. There are rumblings in Irish-American historical circles about a Royal Governor of New York in the 1600s who was Irish and Catholic and must have done something to mark the day.
If he did, he was smart enough to keep it quiet. Even before the Great Hunger, the Irish were second-class citizens at best, and Irish ancestry – and especially Catholic faith – were not things to celebrate.
Still, the Irish are not known for keeping their lights under a bushel, and in the early 1700s, there were modest and dignified celebrations in Boston that spread to other cities. By the 1800s, there were plenty of parades, usually fairly quiet and restrained events, again with the emphasis on pride and dignity, in no small part because of growing nativist prejudice.
It’s hard to imagine in our current multicultural world, but at one point, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy in Britain and the U.S. didn’t even consider the Irish human, never mind white people like them. You don’t let people starve in the road if you think they’re anything like you.
But the Irish are a resilient bunch. They’ve had to be.
By the late 19th century, they’d beaten back a lot of the prejudice just by showing up and working hard, and celebrations of Irish heritage continued and grew. Not without incident – a melee after dueling New York parades in 1867 led to a renewed emphasis on decorum. It apparently worked – the City’s famous parade moved to almost its current spot on Fifth Avenue in 1891, and became a key place for the Irish political machine to show its power…and for New York’s Irish community to show its pride.
Ella Shane and her cousin Tommy Hurley would be two of those proud Irish folks; Ella honors both her Irish father and Jewish mother whenever she can. As tenement kids made good as a singer and boxing champ, our heroes would be careful to celebrate in a restrained and proper fashion. In “A Fatal St. Patrick’s Day,” my story in the LUCK OF THE IRISH charity anthology, Ella and Tommy go to Mass – and then solve a murder!
And then they take shamrocks to Tommy’s mother, Ella’s namesake Aunt Ellen.
The shamrocks, like the Irish coffee recipe in the anthology, come from my grandparents.
My grandfather was proudly Scotch-Irish (we were never entirely sure he didn’t add the “Scotch” part to please Grandma’s Scottish immigrant father!) but he sure liked to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day like a regular Irishman. Which meant Grandma grudgingly made him corned beef and cabbage – and that he very happily brought her shamrocks.
Ella gets shamrocks, too, but you’ll have to read the story to find out how! (Not only is my story worth your time – there are nine more, plus recipes, with all proceeds going to help migrant children, so it’s a St. Patrick’s Day good deed, in addition to everything else!)

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