St. Patrick's is a day of heritage

By Kathyrn Bergin
Collegian Editor
April 2, 2009

Whenever the subject of heritage comes up with a group of people I’ve recently met, I can’t help but feel left out. You see, I’m unable to spout off a bunch of different countries from which my family claims to have hailed. My family is Irish, and that is that. And while I do feel left out from time to time while playing the heritage game, it’s not as bad as it seems, and it’s given me plenty of opportunities to expand my horizons and focus on my heritage.

While other girls were spending their Saturday mornings at ballet classes, I was learning how to Irish step-dance. For a number of years, my father and I would travel to Pearl River, N.Y. (Pearl River has a particularly dense Irish population for such a tiny area) once or twice a week for “fiddle” lessons that led to me competing in a number of feiseanna (singular feis; a traditional Gaelic arts and culture festival) throughout my middle school days.

While other kids were spending time on the Jersey Shore, I was up in the Catskill Mountains, sometimes referred to as the “Irish Alps,” with my parents for Irish Arts Week. When people make fun of Lord of the Dance, I cringe, because I saw it on Broadway, and loved it. For a number of years, I braved the blustery March winds to march up Fifth Avenue in New York with the Bronx Gaelic League during the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade.

While St. Patrick’s Day is traditionally a celebration of the patron saint of Ireland, it’s also a celebration of the country itself. For me, it’s more than a religious holiday, or a celebration of my heritage; St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of family, as well. Every year my great-Aunt Mary holds a huge party at her house, and it seems that St. Patrick’s Day is the only holiday at which everyone in my family would at least make an appearance.

And while my Aunt Mary’s house isn’t huge, it seems to expand on St. Patrick’s Day to accommodate all of the extended family that fills the house, from the uncles who sit at the bar in the basement, to the children who use the closets in the bedrooms upstairs for hide-and-go-seek, and everyone else in between.

As soon as I’d walk into the house on St. Patrick’s Day, I was greeted with kisses and hugs from all of my family members, the smell of corned beef and cabbage wafting through the air. From the late afternoon and into the night, family members were coming and going. Uncles coming straight from work, still in their business casual attire and high-school-aged cousins showing up still in uniform from their athletic games earlier in the day, ready to devour a meal that took hours to prepare.

As the night went on, a family friend who was also a bagpiper would walk in the front door in traditional bag-piping uniform, playing tunes as everyone cleared the way, making a path for him to walk around the house as he played the bagpipes. His route around the house ended in the living room, the center of the house. Remember those fiddle lessons I said I took? For years I would be begged by my parents and aunts to show off my talent and play whatever tunes I had filed into my mental songbook since last year. Giving in, I’d play for my family, and whatever cousin who knew how to Irish step-dance that was there.

I haven’t attended the big party at Aunt Mary’s for the past two years because of the immense amounts of traveling I’d have to do just to return home to northern New Jersey for one day. My sister will text me while she’s at my aunt’s house with whatever family gossip she’s picked up on, and tell me how much older my younger cousins look. My mom and I will talk about who was there, and who wasn’t, the following day on the phone. While I always find a way to have fun on St. Patrick’s Day at school, I always feel a little pang in my heart when I realize the essential ingredient that’s missing: my Irish family.

bergink1@student.lasalle.edu