Growing up, I knew my mom’s family, my grandmother was Irish. She was a first-generation American, and her parents were Irish immigrants who settled in upstate New York. Besides being a part of my ethnicity, it didn’t really affect my upbringing.

When I got married, and we started having kids, we started thinking about our own upbringing and the traditions we wanted for our kids. My wife, too, had an Irish heritage, but she had more family Irish traditions that I hadn’t ever celebrated in the past. So we started incorporating them into our own family traditions.

Later, we lived in Boston for a few years, where there is a large population of Irish-Americans living in and around New England. Living there, St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal. Not only do New Englanders love to imbibe alcohol, but they are also a very prideful people, cognizant of their roots and heritage, and St. Patrick’s Day is their day to celebrate that heritage.

For me personally, I felt like I was learning a new part of who I am and where I came from. It was like a new aspect of my identity that was previously unknown or dormant. Raising kids, my wife and I wanted to teach our kids about that heritage and teach them to embrace that as a part of who they are and where they come from.

One way we tried to do that was to have a special Irish meal for St. Patrick’s Day. We discovered and tried out all kinds of Irish dishes with corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, carrots from stews to soda bread to colcannon. It was all so wonderful, fun to experiment, and so delicious! One of our favorite parts of the meal was dessert: chocolate cake with Guinness Stout topped with a chocolate ganache frosting containing Bailey’s Irish Cream (for adults only!). This spiked chocolate cake is tastelessly referred to as an Irish Car Bomb cake. It is very heavy and does not take long to “disappear” from the table.

On nights when we celebrated, we always tried to invite friends and draw people into our celebration of our heritage and to introduce others to these appetizing meals. It was kind of like a toned-down Thanksgiving in March. St. Patrick’s Day is also known as the Feast of Saint Patrick (Irish: Lá Fhéile Pádraig, “the Day of the Festival of Patrick”). The holiday is a cultural and religious celebration held on March 17, the traditional day he died, believed to be around 461 A.D.

History.com describes St. Patrick’s Day this way:

For thousands of years, the Irish have observed the day of Saint Patrick’s death as a religious holiday, attending church in the morning and celebrating with food and drink in the afternoon. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade, though, took place not in Ireland, but the United States, when Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched through New York City in 1762. As the years went on, the parades became a show of unity and strength for persecuted Irish-American immigrants, and then a popular celebration of Irish-American heritage.

Things are a little different now since my wife and I split up, but I still want to celebrate the day with my kids and my family, feasting over savory and sweet food, teaching them about our Irish heritage, retelling the story of Saint Patrick, the Christian missionary, and teaching them the importance of celebrating your heritage, your identity, and passing that on to the next generation. One day I hope to take a trip with my family to Ireland, to experience the natural beauty, mingle with the locals, and get an even greater understanding of where we came from.

– Jason