Wearing of the Blue

I’ll be wearing blue for St Patrick’s Day, just to be authentic.

Blue, you see, is the official color of Saint Patrick.  He explained the Holy Trinity to pre-Christian Irish by using the three leaves of the shamrock.  The phrase “the wearing of the green” comes from wearing a shamrock as a sign of protest to show you were Catholic during the Protestant reign of Great Britain.  Nowadays if you are a Protestant in the North you wear orange on March 17th in Protest of the Catholic Church.

But St. Patrick liked blue.

You can cover all three bases by wearing green, orange, and blue.  Or you can just puke on yourself, which is what many will do on St. Patrick’s Day, anyway.

When the British Parliament made St. Patrick’s Day an official banking holiday in 1907, part of the legislation called for the pubs to be closed on March 17th.  Some say this caused the second Irish emigration to New York. The Irish did without until a change of law in the 1970’s.

St. Patrick is one of three patron saints of Ireland. The other three being Brigid of Kildare and St Columba.

Being a nun, Brigid was rather frigid and a wet blanket at parties.  St Columba, on the other hand, was a brawler in the best Irish tradition. When St Finnian refused to let St Columba have a psalter (a book of psalms) that Columba had copied by hand, the fight escalated and was not settled until many died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhner.  Columba was exiled to Scotland. Saint Finnian became a saint. Who do YOU think won?

We don’t know when Patrick was born, where exactly in Ireland his mission was, or how he died. In fact, all we have are two letters of his.  In one letter he is defending himself against charges of financial perfidy.  St Patrick refused to take bribes from Kings so they used that as a basis to accuse him of being a thief. Logic is not a strong point in Ireland.

In the other letter, he announces that he has excommunicated certain Brythonic warriors of Coroticu for pillage, rape, and murder.  He did this after they had fled the country: which made it easy for everyone else to shun them.

Patrick did not literally run all the snakes out of Ireland because, according to the fossil evidence, there were no snakes on the island as they had all been crushed by the glaciers in the last Ice Age.  The snake was the symbol for the Druids and Patrick was in the business of converting Druids to Christianity.  More specifically, he had a knack for getting rich Druid females to start nunneries depriving rich Male Druids of places to put their snakes.

This was all foretold in a prophesy of the Druids:

Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: “so be it, so be it.

Druid poetry, you see, is an oxymoron.

We don’t know where Patrick is buried.  There is good reason for this.  When he died a gigantic tug of war called “Battle for the Body” almost happened.  I say almost because the Lord sent a flood to separate the armies and then fooled both of them into thinking they were walking off with the body. Who knows, maybe Patrick got left on the riverbank to provide fertilizer for clover.  Wearing the green, so to speak.

So, for St Patrick’s Day, I will wear blue and have a “bit of the green” on my collar, but no orange. Like all the Druids bellying up to the bar, I’m going to pretend to be Irish Catholic for the day.

Welcome Back! Glad to see you again. Maybe you should subscribe to my RSS feed or email newsletter letter this time. Don't miss a single laugh!

Tagged as: History, Irish