How the Irish Celebrate St Patrick's Day

[Murfreesboro]

I think it would be great on lots of stuff. Last night I was considering doing it for steamed carrots, maybe at Easter. Unfortunately, several in my family don't like cooked vegetables. My husband prefers almost everything raw. I get tired of that, though.

Many years ago a friend gave me a recipe for sautéed broccoli that was great-- butter, white wine, and some kind of spice. Allspice? I think. My husband used to eat that ok, although cooked broccoli is not his thing. But it was good.

Btw, happy first day of spring! Time for me to take our Christmas tree down, lol.

[Andybev01]

Ho ho ho.

Raw vegetables are like eating a salad one ingredient at a time.

[Murfreesboro]

Lol. Yes, especially if you use salad dressing as a dip.

My husband was sad to come home and find the tree down. He said next year he wants me to keep it up through the end of the school year. But he didn't notice until he'd been home for several hours, which tells me he had already gone blind to it.

[Andybev01]

I still have an 18" silver tinsel tree on a bookshelf.

It has lights so on gloomy days I can turn it on for a little happiness.

[Murfreesboro]

It's funny how much little lights in a shady area can cheer a person up.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I noticed the pharmacy still had a tabletop tree up. It had eggs all over its branches and bunny ears for a tree topper.

[Andybev01]

I put out something like that yesterday.

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, how pretty! Is that pink dogwood? Probably not. I believe it has too many petals. It's very pretty, though.

[MauEvig]

I remember working with a guy who said he visited Ireland. I heard that in Ireland St Patrick's day is more of a solemn and perhaps sacred tradition than it is here in the US. I also heard the traditional color was blue, not green.
In the US it feels more like a huge party, but it also celebrates Irish heiritage.
I have to admit the fried potatoes sound good. I wonder if that's where Jews adopted latkes. I'm not sure if the Irish adopted corned beef from the Jews or the other way around since pork and ham weren't available, and the Jews don't eat pork because it's not kosher. From what I understood Irish and Jewish communities were pretty close together when they came over to the states, and with both groups being treated as social outcasts (as far as I could tell anyway) they kind of stuck together and probably swapped ideas.
Supposedly I think one of my ancestors was Irish. The DNA test I took doesn't specify exactly what part of the UK my ancestors on my mother's side are from. I will say though that it adds up, because my Great Grandfather was Jewish. His family came over here from Russia. It's not too unheard of that somewhere along the way romance sparked because of the intermingling between the two people groups. That said, none of my family to my knowledge is Catholic, and a lot of Irish traditions are. So I don't know. I have no answer for you!

[Murfreesboro]

If you have Irish ancestry but no Catholics, your Irish ancestry is probably Scotch-Irish, from the north (think Belfast). Several centuries ago the English imported a lot of Scottish Protestants (Presbyterian mostly) to the north of Ireland, a sort of colonization project. That's why even today, there's a political divide between Northern Ireland and Ireland proper. I have a smattering of Irish ancestry in the south, but my DNA hits in the north were stacked on top of each other when I took one of those tests. That makes sense, because my mother's father always said his family was Scotch-Irish and Welsh (I learned from that test that they were Cornish, too). Once I got those test results, I looked at Scotland and learned I had ancestry from pretty much every nook and cranny there, but the family originated around Edinborough. That makes sense, too, since the Protestants in Scotland were in the lowland (southern) areas centuries ago. The highlanders were Catholic.

You're right that Jewish and Irish immigrants lived in close proximity in the big cities up north. I'm pretty sure the Irish got the corned beef from the Jews. I've read it's not a thing in Ireland, where even today they are more likely to eat cabbage with bacon. I think their bacon may be more like Canadian bacon or ham than ours is. Anyway, over here, it was expensive, so they switched to the corned beef of their Jewish neighbors.

Funny aside: there is a strong streak of redheads in my mother's family. It has continued into my own kids (my older son). Americans tend to think of the Irish as redheaded, but it is really more of a Scottish thing. Scotland has more redheads than anywhere else on earth. I think, during the great era of Irish immigration, Americans didn't differentiate between the southern and northern Irish. The latter were mostly Scottish.

[Andybev01]

Scot and franc over here.

My parents were the very definition of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object.

[Andybev01]

...yhe branches are artificial plum blossom.

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, thanks. They are so pretty!