To me it was just a school type holiday where kids had an excuse to pinch you if you had forgotten to wear green that day. And sometimes there were crafts and maybe something about rainbows and gold pots and leprechauns.
I heard there was a big parade in Boston but it wasn't something you watched like the Macey's Parade. Some people have corned beef and cabbage. But for us it just wasn't a holiday where anything happened at home.
Here's a relevant quote by Orson Scott Card:
St. Patrick's Day. I've never understood why people who are neither Irish nor Catholic pay the slightest attention to this day, while ignoring the patron saints of so many other countries. Do you even know, for instance, what the day of St. George or St. Denis might be? Or of which nations they are the patron saints?
This year I discovered via facebook that much like Santa, some people go to great lengths to make their kids believe that leprechauns have visited their homes. Food turns green. Green glitter shows up on the stairs. Paper shamrock are scattered about. Kids build traps to catch them, and various things are left behind to indicate the leprechauns escaped.
Given that my family didn't go in for Santa, or the Easter Bunny, I can see why this sort of thing for leprechauns never came into the equation either.
I spend a year and a half in Ireland. Some people might think that would make me more likely to celebrate the day, but it actually makes it less so.
St. Patrick is the Patron Saint of Ireland, as he who converted Ireland to Catholicism (and banished all the snakes). It is a religious holiday there. Most people go to mass that day. They wear shamrocks, which represents the Trinity, and looks nothing like the clover we use here.
No one eats corned beef OR cabbage. There is a lot of drinking (but then this is Ireland, there is always a lot of drinking).
None of this makes me feel that this is a holiday where I should celebrate as my five year old said "the day when the little men come out."
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