This op-ed was written for JOUR-457: Food of Our Families. 

This Bostonian has a few bones to pick with the holiday, but regardless of this discourse,
Boston always dominates St. Patrick’s Day.

When I was a child, I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my eyes when St. Patrick’s Day came around.

I don’t know if it’s because I was born and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, a region with a healthy population of Irish people, or because I believe the motivations for celebrating this holiday face a dissonance as to why the day was even commemorated. 

It’s definitely a combination of both. 

My hometown was big into the holiday. Every year, from kindergarten through my senior year of high school, our school district would devise a week of oddly-shaped, vibrantly green meals to get into the spirit. Green eggs and ham? Guilty. Green bangers and mash? You can count on that being in the menu. Some years, the popular kids would dress up for the holiday or bring in themed pastries; when we were older, this morphed into those same students hosting blowout St. Paddy’s Day parties, of course BYOB, usually cheap beers, with an abundant amount of green BORGs. 

Of course, who could forget the classic drunken bar crawl that is the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston? I’d grown up surrounded by St. Patrick’s Day festivities, but what about the cultural context of the holiday?

Despite all the themed food and activities centered around St. Patrick’s Day in school, we never once broached the topic of the history behind the holiday — everyone either seemed to already know, or they didn’t care enough to ask. It wasn’t until a cursory Google search (as I’m writing this now) that I found that the holiday was originally established to honor St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland credited for bringing Christianity to the island, but has since morphed into a general, secularized celebration of Irish culture. Somehow, I’ve been to a St. Paddy’s bar crawl before grasping the significance of the date, which makes the wonder: How many others have gone through the motions of “observing” this holiday without acknowledging its past, and have we, as Americans, gone too far into the proverbial commercialized deep end for holidays?

Yes, pour me a green lager and slap a corned beef sandwich in my hand — but this danger of rising commercialization has long bled into the meanings of the original intent of the holiday, all in favor of profit in its stead. This phenomenon of consumption is leeching into our holidays’ celebrations, from Christmas to Easter to Halloween, even to Kwanzaa and Passover, and diluting the meaning altogether. Even with the increasing occurrences of corporations capitalizing on the popularity of holidays, there still is a way to do it right. 

I took this matter into my own hands and set on my path of examining the St. Patrick’s Day scene in Los Angeles, and how these events compared to my beloved Boston.

Starting in January, South Boston stores and restaurants were already gearing up for March 17; for years, when I drove through the area every weekend, I couldn’t stay oblivious to the variety of Irish delicacies each establishment promised, from steaming-hot corned beef and cabbage to crispy shepherd’s pie wontons to offerings of cheap pints of beer or Irish malted whiskey.

Even from a young age, it was clear to me that everything that came with the honoring of this venerable Irish figure, from the parades to the green foods to the band gigs, all of it meant that alcohol would be in free flow. With the advent of middle school, my peers began experimenting with alcohol, all under the guise of sharing beers with their parents for the saint. For them, the prospect of consuming alcohol for any reason at all greatly overshadowed the significance of the day, as well as its festive foods and activities. This cycle of normalized underaged binge drinking has unfortunately continued throughout my hometown and in other parts of the Boston area — we most certainly need an overhaul of the methods in which we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Though my first bar crawl was fun, it got overstimulating and messy very quickly.

But beyond the commercialization and excessive alcohol consumption, there’s something so 

unique about how Boston celebrates this day that other cities are unable to replicate. This distinction became more apparent to me to the two years of celebrations I’ve attended in L.A.

So, how did these local, Irish-owned taverns and pubs in Boston compare to the pubs and taverns in the L.A. area? To be frank: It was bad. Incomparable, really. 

There’s just something about the tight, unpaved gray cobblestone roads of South Boston. Old brick buildings sit crammed next to their peers on crowded streets, and when March 17 rolls around, the streets burst to life from just before noon to 5 p.m., with a quick break for sustenance before diving back into the crawl. How can the green-T-shirt-wearing posers of southern California compare to a black puffer donning, Celtics beanie boasting Bostonian touting a filled-to-the-brim gallon of BORG (probably christened: “Top of the BORGin’ to ya” or “Rattlin’ BORG” — I’ve seen it all, someone please offer me a novel BORG name)? It doesn’t. 

The energy of the holiday in Boston is inimitable, with the spirit of revolution still streaming from the Freedom Trail through every pub, restaurant and parade. Anywhere else feels like a cheap knockoff. 

Though I don’t necessarily approve of the volume of alcohol Bostonians consume every March, I can’t resist defending my allegiance to the most classic Boston holiday: St. Patrick’s Day.