Green with envy over St. Pat’s Day

Green with envy over St. Pat’s Day

By Bill E. Brock

Special to The Acorn

Ireland prides itself on its pubs. This uncorked vanity means that people spend a lot of time indoors.

They squeeze into these quaint bars for the simple reason that it rains a lot outdoors.

It’s always raining somewhere in Ireland. When it’s not a torrential downpour, then it’s what the locals call "soft rain."

This is the kind that gets you wet slowly.

Rain and lots of sheep contribute to keeping the Emerald Isle green and grass growing on the rooftops.

Ireland is so shrouded in mists and myths that it’s like trying to swim through green jello to separate truth from blarney.

St. Patrick’s Day is fast approaching and a quick look at the legend might offer a wee bit of insight between the raindrops falling on your head.

St. Patrick was a troubled person who had a rotten childhood.

If he hadn’t become a priest, he would have been known as Maewyn Succat.

No wonder he changed his name. He would have gone through life continually spelling Maewyn Succat.

Patrick is much easier to spell.

Any green beer-drinking publicist will tell you that St. Succat’s Day doesn’t sound like a fun name for a parade nor does it have much family appeal going for it.

The first SPD parade was held in New York in 1762. Irish soldiers serving with the British army marched (even on their day off) to show their solidarity.

The biggest and best parades are still in the entry port cities of Boston and New York.

Following the lively parades, only Americans gorge themselves on corned beef and cabbage.

That’s not an Irish thing. Fish and chips is the national food choice.

And, wearing green, that’s not on the Irish best-dressed list, either. Green (actually shamrocks) was worn by Irish soldiers as a sign of rebellion, not as part of the St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

Leprechauns, bless their little anti-social souls, have absolutely nothing to do with SPD. They were modified into happy-go-lucky caricatures to sell stuff like good Irish whiskey.

Ever seen a leprechaun without a smile?

Get ready for this one. St. Patrick wasn’t Irish. He was a Roman citizen born in England.

It’s even been suggested that he’s not an official saint but rather a locally appointed saint who lacks church documentation.

Irish slave traders captured St. Patrick when he was 16 and sold him to a Druid priest in Ireland to tend flocks of sheep and herds of pigs.

Yes, the Irish were into slavery big time.

After six years as a slave, he heard a voice telling him to escape, walk 200 miles to the coast, get aboard a ship and sail home.

To cut a long legend short, St. Patrick studied religion, became a priest, then a Bishop and was commissioned as the second Bishop sent to rid Ireland of its evil ways.

As a 60-year-old Bishop, he came back to do battle with the Druid/Celtic pagan beliefs.

The Druids were earth-friendly and believed in nature spirits to explain natural elements (earth, wind, fire and water) and their effects upon people’s everyday lives.

The Druids taught that the soul was immortal and upon death in the Otherworld, it would be reborn as a baby.

They even held a mourning service for the person who died to be reborn.

The oak tree along with the mistletoe that sometimes grew on it was considered to be a sacred tree.

Even the work "Druid" is believed to combine the roots of the words "oak" and "knowledge" which mean "to know" or "to see."

Druids, once thoroughly trained, were said to have "oak wisdom."

Now, it’s quite clear why The Acorn is diligently read every Thursday.

The oak tree also furnished the smoking material (acorns) for the leprechaun’s ever smoking clay pipes.

There’s even a 24/7 video camera focused on an ancient oak tree in a fairy ring in Tipperary where purportedly there have been numerous "sightings."

Not only can one scan for the anti-social "little people" but also literally watch the green grass grow for hours at a time.

It’s thought that female leprechauns don’t exist. (No one has ever seen one.) However, there are two types of male leprechauns. One is the industrious cobbler who’s only seen working on one shoe, never two shoes.

He fashions all of the shoes for the fairy kingdoms and the demand coupled with his one-at-a-time production keeps him constantly behind schedule.

The other one is the partying, drinking, carousing leprechaun who’s always slightly inebriated and never works.

The shoemaker is also the fairy banker because he’s in charge of the gold buried in hollow mounds and caves by the Danes when they swept through Ireland. The fairies in charge quickly confiscated the loot that had been foolishly stashed right in their backyards and selected the sober, dour, industrious leprechaun to be the gold custodian.

Quite a job, too. The little man (two feet tall) must constantly move the pots of gold because rainbows pinpoint the exact location of the secret hiding place.

Perhaps, the wise fairies decided that it was unsafe to leave so much wealth in one place for too long.

With all the rain in Ireland, this assignment has turned out to be a never-ending ritual.

It’s a game of "catch me if you can."

If a human has the luck of the Irish and catches the leprechaun and never, never, ever takes their eyes off of him, even for a blink, they can demand that the wild leprechaun hand over the treasure, which he will grudgingly do.

Oddly enough, no human has ever been able to outsmart this crafty master of the original Irish lottery.

The leprechaun still has his gold and rainbows are still being chased.