St. Patrick’s Day is one of the few remaining holidays that isn’t protested like the way human rights activists protest Columbus Day, antislavery crusaders protest President’s Day, or light sleepers protest Martin Luther King Jr.’s having a dream.

St. Patrick’s Day is the rare holiday that tries to unify everyone around an ethnicity whether they actually have it or not.

I’m thankful that the rule where “everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day” doesn’t apply to many other celebrations. It would totally suck if none of us were allowed to eat on Yom Kippur or shower on Bastille Day.

Because of my Irish surname, I always feel like I should do something for St. Patrick’s Day, but I mostly end up just feeling bad for knowing so little about my heritage.

My father’s side was Irish-Catholic and my mother’s side was Russian-Jew, so naturally, I was raised Protestant because my mother liked their Christmas services best.

I definitely don’t wear my Irish-American background on my sleeve, but I do own multiple copies of Angela’s Ashes and have a handed-down recipe for Irish soda bread that my wife Jenny kindly makes for me every year.

One year she also made a Barefoot Contessa recipe with the extra buttermilk. People liked it a lot better, but I banned it from the house because it was sweet. Real Irish soda bread should taste like poverty and be difficult to eat.

Music is my favorite part of Irish culture, although I came to it through a rather circuitous route.

While most people who came of age in the 1990s associated Irish music with Bono (the U2 singer of U2, not the cooler one who married Cher), I associated it with beloved cowboy crooner, Garth Brooks.

In particular, his song Ireland, from the album Fresh Horses. Ireland is beautifully written from the perspective of an Irish soldier who expects to die as a pawn in one of England’s misguided imperial wars. He sings of the conditions that caused him to be facing certain death as one of forty against hundreds, and longs only for the peace of seeing Ireland’s beauty once more in heaven.

The song came out the same year as Braveheart and was as deep of a message on masculinity as my fifteen-year-old soul could process. Because I believed myself to be fifty percent Irish at the time (apparently there’s some Welsh mixed in), I developed a personal connection to the song that carries through to this day with my healthy skepticism of Englishmen.

Connecting to Irish roots through Garth Brooks is like learning about cross-dressing by watching Bugs Bunny cartoons; you might not be getting the full experience. It wasn’t until college that I finally learned about real Irish music.

I spent my twenty-first birthday hiding from anthrax at an authentic Irish bar in Washington, DC, and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the semester. Yes, it was morbid to drink Irish car bombs just as our country began the war on terror, but it didn’t seem like a big deal once the fiddler started up with Finnegan’s Wake.

I learned a lot at that bar, like how to patronizingly dismiss anyone advancing the “luck of the Irish” catchphrase as if it were a real thing and not gallows humor commenting on how the typical Irish family spent hundreds of years dealing with setback after setback until dying impoverished and alone.

I’ve given up that fight since I no longer have the undergraduate urge to contradict people for saying perfectly normal things. Equating luck with the Irish does reveal historical ignorance, but it all washes out because leprechauns look adorable on scratch lotto tickets.

Perhaps my favorite thing about St. Patrick’s Day is that it started as an American obsession that Irish tourism officials have since claimed as their own for incredible economic gains.

The Irish are known for being pretty shrewd. Especially the genius who somehow segued the tradition of kissing the blarney stone into the phrase “kiss me, I’m Irish.”

For his own sake, I hope that guy’s moved on to the great emerald isle in the sky because I suspect he wouldn’t fare too well in the #metoo movement. Although it’s possible he’d get away with it. St. Patrick’s Day is the Las Vegas of holidays – day drinking is generally accepted and nobody ever talks about what happened after it’s done.

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