St Patrick's Day, Part Two (The less ranty edition...)

We're doing our "Irish" dinner tonight, since we didn't really have time yesterday. Irish brown bread and a boiled dinner of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, onions, and carrots. Not at all a traditional Irish dish in actuality, but something made popular by the Irish communities in New England. Which works for me, you know, considering that I'm one of them New England Irish and all.

Which is actually something that doesn't get a lot of attention in the family. See, us kids/grandkids, we're also part Japanese, my grandmother came here from Japan fifty-ish years ago, and it's always been the more obvious 'ancestry' in the house. Right now my grandmother's sitting in the other room watching Japanese TV on her satellite, we just finished a little 'appetizer' of sashimi. Traditional Japanese items decorate the house.

So when this time of year rolls around, it's a nice time to remember the other part of my (known) ancestry. To me it's not a day about the Saint himself, or what he did or did not do, or anything like that, it's just a day to remember those ancestors. The ones who lived and died in Ireland, pagan and Christian alike, the ones who came to America about a hundred years ago. A day to be a little proud of them, focus on them - and there are some interesting, and some tragic stories on that side of the tree, (one of my Irish ancestors, Julia Barry, went down on the Titanic). The whole debate surrounding the day is just sort of foreign to me, because so many people in my area feel the same way about the day.

On a related note, I decided to do one of those ancestry DNA kit things. I know basically nothing about my mom's side of the family, and I think it'll be nice to fill in some of those missing gaps.