Happy Irish New Year

Redheaded Blacksmith

Howdy invisable readers, just a quick note on this Irish New Year's Eve.

Drinkin' and Leprechaun chasin' is not really what Irish New Year is all about you know. Sure, the greeting card companies and beer merchants want you to think that it is, but in reality it's all about beating snakes with sticks.

You see, Saint Patrick is credited with driving the snakes out of ireland. Now, of course I realize that what they mean by that is that he brough Christianianity to the isle, and drove out the older pagan religions, but I would like to see a more 'merican take on that old parable.

We should have a day where we just send our kids out with sticks to try to find snakes and drive them out of 'merica. Now don't get your trousers in a knot, I am joking of course. Beating on real snakes is not very healthy for the serpents in question, and we need those to keep the rat and mice population down so we don't get a major infestation of ratflu going around again. But in the same vein we have screwed up lots of other holiday rituals, we should make paper mache' snakes and club them like Piñatas. Or at least hide some garden hoses in the bushes and watch the little ones go at it. Why? Cause our parents did it to us, and their parents did it to them. They had often forgotten the reason for the ritual, but they carried it on anyway.

I fondly remember a bright, warm Easter Sunday as a very small child, looking in my Grandmother's flowers for brightly colored Easter eggs. As I was quite young, my understanding of the holiday was a little vauge, and I entertained everyone by finding the largest easter egg ever, and tried to haul a bowling ball sized pink granite rock out of the flower bed and out into the yard. It probably weighed as much as I did.

Would it not have been fun for the wee ones to have been given sticks and sent out to find the bits of shredded garden hose left over from a lawn mower mishap of the past? I think it would have! Then I might have grown up believing that snakes were full of candy well into my adult years, just like I believed that snow came with holes in it for quite some time... but that is another story.

Off to make something!