For Saint Patrick

~by Jeff Tryon

When I was a kid growing up in Brown County, all we knew about Saint Patrick’s Day was that you had better wear something green to school on that holy day, or you were likely to get pinched, and that pinch would be completely legal and accepted, no matter how much it hurt, because you had failed to properly observe the holiday by wearing the correct color.

This went on year in and year out until the eighth grade, when a new kid moved to town, a very bright young man destined to become my best friend. Unlike me or anyone else I knew or had ever known, he was raised Catholic and knew a bit more about the whole Saint Patrick situation than the rest of us benighted Indiana Baptists.

“You know, you guys are all protestants,” he casually observed on that fateful Saint Patrick’s Day. “You’re actually supposed to wear orange on Saint Patrick’s Day. It is we Catholics who wear green.”

Over the years, I have celebrated many a Saint Patrick’s Day, usually by consuming mass amounts of alcohol with my friend because, well, we’re all Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day, right?

I am told that, even though the day inevitably falls in the middle of Lent, the archbishop of the Chicago Diocese grants a dispensation for all good Catholics to sidestep the rigors of that religious fast for a day of enthusiastic drinking in honor of the man who drove the snakes out of Ireland (but that’s another story). And that’s good enough for me.

These days, I have developed or devolved down into a more or less set ritual for observing this important marker holiday that helps to get us through until spring.

Music always helps to set the mood, and I’ve got a couple of CD’s of Irish drinking songs, what my friend calls “Irish Sniper music” to set the tone.

We make Rueben Sandwiches grilled corned beef and Swiss cheese on a good marbled rye, slathered with Thousand Island Dressing and covered with sauerkraut. Yummy!

We drink a bottle or two of Guinness Extra Stout, the beer so perfect that they’ve been making it in exactly the same way since 1759. And I am not averse to a jar or two of a good Irish whiskey like Jameson or Bushmills. Erin go Bragh!

As darkness falls, I observe a new tradition— one that I have invented myself, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Ireland, Catholicism, or Saint Patrick.

I burn my Christmas tree.

I always put up a live tree for Christmas, and when it has done its duty and progressed from a delightful ornament of the season to a definite fire hazard, I strip off the decorations and toss it unceremoniously out into the yard (in the woods).

And there it lays, through the shocks and outrages of late winter until March 17, when I stand it up in the firepit and set it ablaze in a brief but spectacular immolation which sends sparks flying up into the night sky, reminding us of why it is a good idea not to have a dead fir tree in your house.

We call it “The Burning of the Green.”

Thus, we welcome spring. 