urbpan | St. Pat's Godawfuls -- no offense

St. Patricks Day is rapidly making up ground behind Christmas in the category of enthusiastically celebrated Quasi-religious bullshit holiday. Maybe it's just Boston, maybe it's because I went into an Irish pub last Sunday to retrieve a lost item and had to wade through a swath of green-clad college dunderheads, but I think it's stupid. When I aligned myself more closely with Paganism, I took offense at a holiday honoring the Christian annihilation of Ireland's indigenous religion. Now I'm older and more mellow, so I choose be smugly amused at the asinine trappings of the day. To wit:

These flowers (I can't even tell what they are under all this crap--mums?) are displayed exactly where the glitter-dusted poinsettias were around Christmastime. I have run out of tags, so I'm going to use my xmas godawfuls tag for this entry, so that we can find it later, and sink in our chairs shaking our heads sadly.

Perhaps a better use of the day would be to contemplate the long oppression of the Irish, culminating in the great famine, and discussing how such a thing came to be, and what we humans can do to avoid it in the future. Or you could put on a green plastic derby and get shit-faced, either way.

I bought myself a sixer of Smithwicks from the endcap at Trader Joes, not to honor my Irish ancestry (one ancestor known for sure--a young man stolen from his home at 16 years of age and forced into labor in the United States--mostly I'm of Anglo descent) but because it's a damn good beer.

No offense.