HEALTH PLUS:It's time to don the leprechaun hats and green socks once again, writes MARIE MURRAY,
LÁ FHÉILE Pádraig, St Patrick’s Day. “It’s a great day to be Irish.”
It’s a great day to be a child. Specific childhood memories are forged on this day. St Patrick’s Day provides parents with an annual opportunity to create appropriate lifelong memories for their children: of childhood, of family, of celebration, of community, of local carnival, civic pride, national identity and international cohesion.
It is a time for appreciation of one’s own culture, awareness of alternative cultures and the richness of an inclusive Irishness in multicultural Ireland.
St Patrick’s Day occurs at just the right time for children. It is one of the annual festivities that punctuate the school year at exactly the right time. It arrives when Christmas is but a memory, when Pancake Tuesday is over but followed by the asceticism of Lent, when spring is promising but has not yet arrived, when Easter is imminent but yet to come, when summer is too far away to imagine and when there is a need for a break from the routine of school.
It pops up with wonderful pageantry; glorious indulgence, roguish imagery, garish “greenery” and tongue-in cheek paddywhackery in the midst of serious national pride.
It embodies all the contradictions that make up Irish identity: religiousness and irreverence, pagan myth and Christian doctrine, excess and caution, welcome and containment and endless celebration for its own sake by any of Irish descent or none. Our “wild geese” fly home and our wilder residents revel with them.
It is a day for adults and children: a day to be together: for flag waving and badge wearing, for the tackiness of leprechaun hats, green socks, scarves of green, white and gold, for green milkshakes and green beer, for Guinness and gobstoppers, for sports events, for all things Gaelic, for hurley and camogie and the “wearing o’ the green”.
It is a National Day celebrated all over the world from Durty Nelly’s in Bunratty to Durty Nelly’s in Beijing. And of course there are few places in the US that do not exceed what we offer at home: where the Chicago river runs green as does the line along 5th Avenue in New York for just one of the hundreds of American parades celebrated by those Americans who are not over here celebrating with us.
But St Patrick’s Day is also about personal memories that mark and measure time. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s in less affluent times than subsequent decades will remember the St Patrick’s Day of childhood as a day of indulgence during a time of deprivation. When Lenten fasting was the norm, St Patrick’s Day offered reprieve: to break that fast, have treats and drink lemonade all day long.
It was the day when sweet sucking, toffee chewing, chocolate munching and biscuit gorging were availed of to the point of hysterical hyperglycaemia. It was the day when “best clothes’’ were worn with new socks and fresh ribbons holding masses of Shamrock.
It was a day when hymns hailing “Glorious St Patrick” were sung and when an unconfident and somewhat oppressed people felt equal to anyone and felt pride that even children sensed and participated in.
It was, and it still is, a day of affiliation, of participation and pageantry, the highlight of which is the St Patrick’s Day Parade. While the trucks and tractors, the goose-pimpled paraders, the scarcity of floats and the relatively small number of spectacles of the past may now be replaced by high-tech presentations and evening pyrotechnics, St Patrick’s Day has a particular place in a child’s heart if it is celebrated annually with the people the children love.
What creates memory is routine. Predictability is dear to children in relation to events. In the same way that one cannot deviate from the exact wording in a bedtime story, children love to know that each year will bring the same delights. This is why wearing the same badges annually, having special St Patrick’s Day tableware, sprigs of Shamrock on the table and a special extended family meal means so much to children. They like to hear the same tunes and sing the same songs specific to the day. They like to receive a small gift: an annual bright, gaudy memento to accumulate each year during childhood and keep with their memories of the day forever. They like making St Patrick’s Day cards. They like the sequence of celebration to be similar and to give and receive the same greeting. So Lá Fhéile Pádraig to every child and to all of you today and every St Patrick’s Day.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the student counselling services in UCD. Her collected Irish Times essays are in Living Our Times, published by Gill and MacMillan