St. Patrick’s Day Isn’t About Being Irish

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about wearing green, although the entirety of the Irish diaspora is proud of our homeland’s lush, verdant countryside.

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about getting knockered, although we certainly like to celebrate anything and everything with a pint (or four).

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about leprechauns, or pots of gold, or luck, or four-leaf clovers, although all of those tropes come from our rich tradition of storytelling.

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t even about being Irish.

While St. Patrick’s Day has grown into a global celebration of proud Irish heritage today (one I enthusiastically participate in), that’s not how this day started. Granted, the feast of St. Patrick has existed within the Catholic Church as a celebration of the arrival of Christianity to Ireland for centuries, but it wasn’t about Irish heritage until the Charitable Irish Society of Boston started hosting gatherings for Irish immigrants to the British colonies in 1737.

The city of New York first observed the day with gatherings in the home of John Marshall in 1762, and their first recorded St. Patrick’s Day parade was when Irish soldiers in the British Army marched through the streets in 1766. The city of Philadelphia soon followed suit in 1771, as did Savannah, Georgia, in 1824.

St. Patrick’s Day used to be about a Catholic saint named Patrick, but it finally became about Irish heritage right here in America.

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about being Irish — it’s about being Irish-American.

I’m a second-generation American. My skin might not make it obvious, but it was less than a hundred years ago that someone came here yearning to breathe free. If she hadn’t been allowed in, America wouldn’t have me or my enormous, trans-continental family fueling its industry, teaching its children, healing its sick, selling its goods, or even playing in its national pastime.

My huge family and I are the immigrant success story. I am the result of one brave woman who sent herself across an ocean in the hope that things would be better here.

Today, I think of my family’s proud past. I think of my grandmother who came to San Francisco from Carndonagh, and my mother who ventured out again to New York. I think of all the staggering odds my family had to face and overcome in order for me to be who I am today.

But I also think of the future. I think of the innovators, the educators, and the doctors my children might grow up with. I think of all the great advances America still has ahead of it. I think of the second-generation Americans to come.

I think America’s best days are still ahead of it. I only hope that today, during this national celebration of a hope that paid off against tremendous odds, America agrees with me.

I am a proud American, and proudly Irish.

And a proud product of immigration.