My regular readers will undoubtedly know my family and I lived in Dublin, Ireland for a few years. You’ll also know we really liked living there and miss it a lot since we returned to Florida.
It has become very important to me that my children remember and value our time there. They were given an opportunity that most of their classmates will never have and I want them to cherish that.
I have a holiday “kit” for each major holiday (Valentines, Easter, 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas) which includes books and other little toys and I rotate them throughout the year. I’ve decided to add St. Patrick’s Day to the mix as an opportunity to remember and discuss our time in Ireland each year. But creating a St. Patrick’s day holiday kit has become a very daunting task.
I am bitterly disappointed by how shallow a holiday it is in America. It seems to be purely an opportunity to drink, party and be careless. Definitely not what I want to teach my children about the holiday and Ireland. I also don’t want them to focus on leprechauns, wearing green and “trying Irish foods” which is what all the children’s books focus on. Everything I find here for St. Patrick’s Day just perpetuates the untrue cultural stereotypes Americans have about the Irish (and unfortunately the stereotypes we have about other cultures are severely wrong too).
I’m no expert on Irish culture and won’t pretend to be. I know we could have immersed ourselves much more in Irish life while there but there are a few things I gathered during our time there. For one, yes the Irish drink (and sometimes a lot), but they’re generally not the rowdy, fighting drunks that Americans perceive them as. In fact, the first year we were in Dublin and did the whole St. Patrick’s Day thing, the vast majority of people out and being stupid were tourists (mostly Americans, imagine that!)
We experienced St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland as a family holiday. It is a bank holiday which means nearly everyone gets the day off but this doesn’t mean everyone goes out and parties and gets drunk. Conversely, people take it as an opportunity to spend time with their families. Dublin has a yearly festival which spans several days and includes a parade along with a family funfair, music and street performers (a daily occurrence in parts of Dublin but much more so during the festival) and numerous other activities and goings on. Sure there’s also the “Irish Craft Beer Village” but I’m sure those sort of activities are mainly aimed at the tourists who think the holiday is only about drinking.
Dublin is far from the only place that provides these family opportunities. Many people I knew never went into the city but preferred the smaller festivities outside Dublin City (hubby and I in fact only spent that first St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin. The other two years we took the opportunity to travel with the time off and get away from the rowdy tourists).
I want my children to learn the story of St. Patrick, the history of Ireland and its people, and the cultural differences which we found so wonderful and inviting while there (a stark difference from our new home). I hope that I can manage to actually get these points across despite the American version of things. I also hope that my dear friends still in Ireland (many of whom have much more time and experience there than I did) can add to this post, clarify and even correct things where I may be mistaken.
