A minor fun fact about St. Patrick's Day is corned beef and cabbage isn't really a native Irish thing Like yes, they had corned beef in Ireland (and since this became a thing some people have really pushed the theory it was invented in Ireland) But it wasn't a traditional dish
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A thing that started in English culture (the idealized "Sunday roast" as a symbol of the rich-people good life), American "cowboy culture" making use of all the pastureland in the middle of the country, Jewish immigration in big cities, etc.
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Anyway what's really funny about this is that this makes corned beef and cabbage a *perfect* symbolic dish for St. Patrick's Day Which is really, in its present form, an Irish-American holiday and not a native Irish one at all
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And is this sort of self-deprecating celebration of working-class Irish-American culture Which was a life that was still generally objectively shitty, but compared to how fucked the Old Country was at the time made America feel like the promised land
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"That's BEEF in the goddamn cabbage, from a COW" "They have whole FIELDS of potatoes here, ENDLESS potatoes, they NEVER RUN OUT"
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Hence a traditional St. Patrick's Day celebration involves getting drunk and disorderly from chugging keg after keg of the cheapest, wateriest beer imaginable
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(I would strongly argue that it doesn't actually matter whether the brand is Irish or American, the authentic beer for St. Patrick's Day is whatever the cheapest thing they have on tap is, and if you drink your beer out of a bottle on that day you are spitting on the ancestors)
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Fun fact: A lot of Irish people in Ireland dislike what is seen as the American-imported transformation of St. Patrick's Day into the raucous bacchanal kind of festival (something the original St. Patrick would've detested, and that reinforces stereotypes they'd rather be rid of)
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At the same time, there were people in Ireland who wanted to try to capitalize on this Leading to the Guinness Brewing Company creating a whole-ass invented holiday to celebrate Irish drinking culture, named "Arthur's Day" after Arthur Guinnesshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%27s_Day …
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It's so wild that 1) Ireland tried to make St. Patrick's Day no longer a holiday for Irish people getting drunk by creating a holiday that WAS that 2) Guinness has such an economic stranglehold in Ireland they were able to make this holiday all about themselves
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3) A few years later, they caved and canceled the whole thing because of a growing backlash over how alcoholism in Ireland isn't actually cute or funny but is a major generational crisis 4) It's called "Arthur's Day" and I didn't find out about it until after I quit drinking
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End of conversation
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