The Spring 2025 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online (or read it at issuu).
I concede that it’s been a good while since I wrote about St. Patrick’s Day entirely from scratch.
That’s because past efforts have always been ripe for quick and easy remixing, thus sparing me the need to yet again squeeze my brain until it yelps. In my line of work, reruns are absolutely essential; don’t allow anyone to tell you differently.
There’s also the matter of lesson plans.
Consider that retiring elementary school teachers can look back on careers spent repeating themselves on a daily basis. Each year a new crop of kiddos in desperate need of foundational instruction arrives, and they’re taught the same fundamental lessons as before — that is, until a school board, televangelist or tinhorn dictator scatters the pieces.
Consequently, let’s start at the beginning, and work our way toward the inevitable greatest hits playlist of this most Irish of holidays.
As the DNA evidence suggests, a small portion of me is Irish. The rest of me is English, German and even a bit Swedish, which is probably a legacy of wild Viking oats being sowed amid the British Isles way back when.
Of course, my passport is oblivious, plainly asserting that I’m 100% American, but then again, unless one’s heritage is Native American, we Americans all came from somewhere else, voluntarily or otherwise. It seems we’re all born on the 4th of July, unless it’s time for a “heritage” holiday: Kwanzaa, Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, Oktoberfest, Burns Night — or St. Patrick’s Day.
Then we’re eager to share in the experience of past arrivals to our collective aerie of a nation-state, even while clamoring loudly about whatever contemporary immigration situation is currently prompting the most distemper on social media (and in the process, accomplishing nothing in terms of resolving the issue).
If I’m to be honest, it never made very much sense to me that I’d choose to honor the Irish experience in America (or the Uruguayan, Eritrean or Indonesian) without learning something about the people in question. I readily concede that serious-mindedness is an innate, personalized response, because for me “fun” tends to be neither frivolous nor spontaneous, and certainly not Disneyesque.
Do as you will, but committing cultural atrocities simply...Read more
