Celebrating St. Patrick's Day

Friends are coming to enjoy corned beef and cabbage to celebrate the holiday with us. I won't be making soda bread since successful baking at high altitude is challenging and I am not really a baker. I do remember my Grandmother Egan's tasty soda bread which she made every week in Butte, Montana at 5,000 feet. I'll serve Dubliner and Cashel Blue for a cheese course. As traditional as I can manage.

We won't be serving Black Velvets made with Guinness and champagne, nor Black and Tans with stout and pale ale but I might have to toast sláinte with a glass of bubbly. Irish coffee for dessert?

It's a meal I love to cook as it brings back happy memories from across the years. It was always an occasion for music with my father singing sentimental Irish ballads like Danny Boy or rousing rebel tunes like Off to Dublin in the Green. Daddy loved to sing those songs and on a trip to see family in Ireland for his 80th birthday, my sister Dianne and I had to practically drag him out of a pub near Kenmare Bay. He kept paying the band to play his favorites as he sang along.

My father and me near Kenmare Bay the afternoon before the singing.

While I did not inherit his fine voice, I confess to standing in a Georgetown bar singing The Black Velvet Band, cheered on by my dear friend Jeanne Murphy. It wasn't a complete disaster as other patrons joined in. One of my most memorable Irish sing songs happened when I was staying with friends at Ballymaloe in east Cork, the wonderful hotel that is home to the Irish Cooking School. After dinner guests gathered in the large parlor to listen to the Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers who happened to be visiting as well. What an evening!

Of course, when I lived in New York City, I attended the big parade down Fifth Avenue on several St. Patrick's Days and followed the crowds to the Irish bars on Second Avenue where everyone pretended to be Irish, if just for the day (and night). New York is not the only American city that celebrates the holiday. There are parades in Boston, Philadelphia, Reno, and Savannah among other cities. Then there's Chicago where they dye the river bright green in honor of the day. People will be celebrating in Butte, too, with Ancient Order of Hibernians, an organization to which my grandparents belonged in the 1920's, helping to kick off the festivities.

My grandparents: my grandmother smiling under her large hat and my grandfather with his hat jauntily cocked at the Annual Convention of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Great Falls, Montana in 1923.

While my celebrating won't include a parade, I will do my best to honor my family heritage with a good meal, lots of potatoes, a drink and likely a song or two. Happy St. Paddy's Day, my friends.