Let Me Entertain You

I'm staying home Saturday night. St. Patrick's Day and Saturday, can there be a more volatile mix? St. Pat's is to drinking what the 4th of July is to barbecue, Thanksgiving is to turkey, and Easter to chocolate rabbits, which is to say the original point of the holiday has been long forgotten in favor of ingesting something, usually to excess. All the evidence points to the fact that St. Patrick, who died at the end of the 5th century, did a lot of good deeds, as one might expect of someone if he had any hope of sainthood, but the idea that he rid Ireland of snakes is entirely apocryphal. There never were any snakes in Ireland in the first place. He's the patron saint of Ireland, but was in fact born in England and was captured and taken to Ireland as a slave when he was sixteen. As a young man he escaped back to his homeland, but then returned to Ireland because "voices" told him to go and convert poor people. At some point he was put on trial for "financial improprieties," and we know he was very popular with rich ladies, a lot of whom gave away all their money and became nuns. It's all pretty interesting, but none of the facts give any hint of why his feast day should have become an occasion for pedal to the metal boozing. Unless you consider that when an Irishman says "I'll drink to that," it's not particularly noteworthy. An Irishman will drink to anything."