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| From a St. Patrick's Day Parade in Washington, D.C., several years ago. |
St. Patrick's Day seems to be the time when everyone claims to have some Irish in them. That makes the celebrations more fun. Well, I'm going to stake my Irish claim, too. According to Ancestry.com, I am at least 20% Irish. As there is more data to work with, Ancestry updates heritage percentages from time to time. My percentages bounce around among England, Scotland, and Ireland. In some of the past iterations, I was almost 1/2 Irish.
When I was growing up, I would hear my aunts talk about how I looked like my great-grandmother, who was born in Ireland. I never met her, but I always liked the fact that I had a "somewhat" recent immigrant ancestor. I especially liked it because one year, she was the queen of the Ritchie County Fair. Decades later, we found out through Ancestry that my mother's birth father was not the same one who was on her birth certificate. So the beauty queen, whom I supposedly looked like, was not my relative genetically, after all. I think there's some irony in there somewhere. :)
St. Patrick's Day is not one that we celebrate much, at least not like in our younger days when green beer was a must (for Ward, anyway). Or when we attended St. Patrick's Day parades in New Orleans. At these parades, they threw vegetables to make an Irish stew instead of beads. (And someday, I will find the picture of the cabbages, potatoes, and carrots we came home with from the parade.)
My nod today to St. Paddy's day was wearing a green shirt to exercise class. It was a fun class because we did relay races with chocolate coins from a pot of gold. And yes, we did eat the chocolate at the end.
Did you celebrate St. Patrick's Day this year?
Until next time...
