{"id":459,"date":"2013-03-17T09:38:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-17T13:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/?p=459"},"modified":"2017-03-30T09:46:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T13:46:03","slug":"happy-st-patricks-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/17\/happy-st-patricks-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy St. Patrick’s Day!"},"content":{"rendered":"

My regular readers will undoubtedly know my family and I lived in Dublin, Ireland for a few years.\u00a0 You\u2019ll also know we really liked living there and miss it a lot since we returned to Florida.<\/p>\n

It has become very important to me that my children remember and value our time there.\u00a0 They were given an opportunity that most of their classmates will never have and I want them to cherish that.<\/p>\n

I have a holiday \u201ckit\u201d for each major holiday (Valentines, Easter, 4th<\/sup> of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas) which includes books and other little toys and I rotate them throughout the year.\u00a0 I\u2019ve decided to add St. Patrick\u2019s Day to the mix as an opportunity to remember and discuss our time in Ireland each year.\u00a0 But creating a St. Patrick\u2019s day holiday kit has become a very daunting task.<\/p>\n

I am bitterly disappointed by how shallow a holiday it is in America.\u00a0 It seems to be purely an opportunity to drink, party and be careless.\u00a0 Definitely not what I want to teach my children about the holiday and Ireland.\u00a0 I also don\u2019t want them to focus on leprechauns, wearing green and \u201ctrying Irish foods\u201d which is what all the children\u2019s books focus on.\u00a0 Everything I find here for St. Patrick\u2019s Day just perpetuates the untrue cultural stereotypes Americans have about the Irish (and unfortunately the stereotypes we have about other cultures are severely wrong too).<\/p>\n

I\u2019m no expert on Irish culture and won\u2019t pretend to be.\u00a0 I know we could have\u00a0immersed\u00a0ourselves much more in Irish life while there but there are a few things I gathered during our time there.\u00a0 For one, yes the Irish drink (and sometimes a lot), but they\u2019re generally not the rowdy, fighting drunks that Americans perceive them as.\u00a0 In fact, the first year we were in Dublin and did the whole St. Patrick\u2019s Day thing, the vast majority of people out and being stupid were tourists (mostly Americans, imagine that!)<\/p>\n

We experienced St. Patrick\u2019s Day in Ireland as a family holiday.\u00a0 It is a bank holiday which means nearly everyone gets the day off but this doesn\u2019t mean everyone goes out and parties and gets drunk.\u00a0 Conversely, people take it as an opportunity to spend time with their families.\u00a0 Dublin has a yearly festival which spans several days and includes a parade along with a family funfair, music and street performers (a daily occurrence in parts of Dublin but much more so during the festival) and numerous other activities and goings on.\u00a0 Sure there\u2019s also the \u201cIrish Craft Beer Village\u201d but I\u2019m sure those sort of activities are mainly aimed at the tourists who think the holiday is only about drinking.<\/p>\n

\"IMG00050-20100314-1434\"<\/a> \"IMG00054-20100314-1442\"<\/a>\u00a0\"St.<\/a><\/p>\n

Dublin is far from the only place that provides these family opportunities.\u00a0 Many people I knew never went into the city but preferred the smaller festivities outside Dublin City (hubby and I in fact only spent that first St. Patrick\u2019s Day in Dublin.\u00a0 The other two years we took the opportunity to travel with the time off and get away from the rowdy tourists).<\/p>\n

I want my children to learn the story of St. Patrick, the history of Ireland and its people, and the cultural differences which we found so wonderful and inviting while there (a stark difference from our new home).\u00a0 I hope that I can manage to actually get these points across despite the American version of things.\u00a0 I also hope that my dear friends still in Ireland (many of whom have much more time and experience there than I did) can add to this post, clarify and even correct things where I may be mistaken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My regular readers will undoubtedly know my family and I lived in Dublin, Ireland for a few years.\u00a0 You\u2019ll also know we really liked living there and miss it a lot since we returned to Florida. It has become very important to me that my children remember and value our time there.\u00a0 They were given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,582,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-mommys-life","category-spring-celebrations","category-tiny-travellers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3562,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions\/3562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}