Soft Irish Rain

Since when did St Patrick’s Day get abbreviated to Patty’s Day? I keep seeing these references and doing a double take. I mean Paddy’s Day has become common parlance but honestly, Patty’s Day?
I’m thinking back to St Patrick’s Days of yore deep in the rural midlands.
It was the day when my family had two opportunities to shine.
First, my father was dispatched in early morning to forage for the perfect shamrock. Not fake stuff, not clover but freshly plucked three leaved shamrock in abundance and somehow he never returned empty-handed to the delight of my mother.
Then we marched off the short walk to the chapel, proudly wearing huge sprigs of dew dripping shamrock alongside our St Patrick’s Day badges.
Every year on that one day the parish priest conducted the Mass in Irish, so armed with Irish prayer books and thanks to weeks of painstaking rehearsals with our committed parents, we were poised to ring out the responses in triumphant Gaelic unison.
Ours were the only voices in an otherwise mute congregation. Occasionally our mother, a fluent speaker, was even called on to do a reading, another family triumph.
Much of the remainder of the day was spent discussing the poor excuses for shamrock worn by most of our neighbours and their embarrassing lack of Irish as the prayer books were carefully attached together with elastic bands and stored away with the badges until the following year.

Tags: St Patrick's Day

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 8:25 pm and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.