A Great day For The Irish

It's the most wonderful time of the year, St. Patrick's Day is upon us. What makes this day more than any other? The only other Saints day that everyone knows is St. Valentines and they dropped the St. a long time ago. St. Patrick's day is when everyone is Irish, that makes it wonderful, and there in lies the problem. Everyone thinks they know what the Irish are all about but what they know is the stereotype. One, corned beef and cabbage is not Irish. Corned beef  became a Irish cuisine when they started to buy it from Jewish butchers in New York city. In Ireland it would have been boiled ham or bacon and cabbage, (Ireland did produce a salted, cured beef but it was a delicacy that only the wealthy could afford). The Irish drink more than anyone in the world. Not even close. The Irish spend a lot of time in pubs but that is a social thing not a drink to get drunk thing. The public house was the place to find out what was happening, how your neighbors were, what was going on. And the pubs close early, still do. Here the bars are open till the early hours of the morning, some places they don't close at all, (Love you NOLA). What the Irish do love is a good time. They love to sing and dance and tell a good story and that's why everyone wants to go to an Irish pub, it's the atmosphere.

What the Irish aren't is what was displayed on youtube last year and in the newspapers, the infamous "Kegs and Eggs" riot in the student ghetto of Albany. So if you want to enjoy This St. Patrick's Day (notice it's not St. Paddy's or St. Patty's Day) start the day off at mass, put on your best green (by the way the official color of Ireland is blue) watch the Parade in what ever town you are in , if they have one, go to a public house with your friends (Irish pub saying, There are no strangers here, just friends you haven't met yet), drink, sing dance, laugh and then you can call yourself Irish.

Everyone knows the Irish have had a lot to do with the building of this country, here are just a few little facts about the Irish in America.

56 signatures on the Declaration of Independence, 8 were of Irish heritage

Everyone knows that John Kennedy was Irish but there were 21 other Presidents that have Irish blood from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama.

Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly (middle name, Curran), Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Georga O'Keefe just to name a few famous Irish Americans, but how a couple of notorious Irish.

 Born in New York City to famine refuge parents, Henry McCarty, became well known in New Mexico as Billy the Kid.

Shot and killed on Dove St. in Albany, New York City gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond.

Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant to American, better known as Typhoid Mary.