Category Archives: St. Patrick’s Day

Mar 16 2018
St. Joseph's Day, St. Patrick's Day, St. Urho's Day

St. Urho’s Day (Dream Waltz)

We’re in the final stretch of Lent, and in the midst of it each year come three celebrations to take a bit of the edge off of all that spareness. They begin today with St. Urho’s Day, when we are all perhaps a little bit Finnish. I wrote this piece for St. Urho’s Day a couple of years ago. Since then, Finlandia Days has returned to Bryant Park here in Lake Worth, though it has a new name: Midnight Sun Festival. Fair enough. I love the photo of Viola Turpeinin, whose large septa toothed coral, the one she found on Lake Worth Beach, is on display at the Museum of the City of Lake Worth, right downtown between Lake and Lucerne Avenues. And I love her “Dream Waltz”–– Unelma Valssi. I’d like you to love her, too, which is why I’ve chosen to reprint her story today for St. Urho’s Day. And so here we go.

 

Viola Turpeinen

Here we are in the midst of one of the most interesting weeks of the year, at least in terms of quirky holidays. We have not one, not two, but three saints’ days to celebrate, and while saints’ days are not all that unusual, each one of these is important to a particular ethnic group, which makes for some very big celebrating, especially welcome in these more somber days of Lent.

There is of course the granddaddy of saints’ days: St. Patrick’s Day, on the 17th. Everyone, it it said, is at least a little Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Two days later brings St. Joseph’s Day: not as widely celebrated, but immensely important to Italy and the Italian American community, and we’ll be eating zeppole, pastries made especially for the day. But ahead of St. Joseph’s Day and ahead of St. Patrick’s Day both comes today’s celebration: St. Urho’s Day. And today, perhaps, everyone is at least a little bit Finnish.

St. Patrick may have driven all the snakes from Ireland, but it was St. Urho who drove all the grasshoppers from Finland, saving the vineyards and the the grape harvest and thus the wine. This he accomplished by proclaiming Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen, or in English, “Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to Hell!”

Perhaps you are thinking, “I’m not familiar with this story.” This is because you do not live near Finns. I first heard about St. Urho many years ago here at the local Finlandia Days celebration, which back then was held at Bryant Park on the lagoon here in Lake Worth. In that same park there is a memorial to Finnish war heroes. Up the road on Lake Avenue in the Allstate Insurance Office is the Finnish Consulate. Across the town line in Lantana is the Finnish American Rest Home and Suomi Talo (or Finland House, the Finnish social club) and Palm Beach Bakery, one of a couple of Finnish bakeries in the area. Between Lake Worth and Lantana, we have more Finns here than anywhere else save Finland. And so in this land, where it is so easy to come across folks speaking Spanish and Creole and Portuguese most any day of the week, it is just as easy to hear some Finnish, too. And Finnish tales, like the legend of St. Urho.

And so at Finlandia Days celebration years ago, somewhere in between the Wife Carrying Contest and a performance by the Finnish Accordion Orchestra, I heard the story of the saint who drove the grasshoppers from Finland. He is honored the day before a certain more famous saint who drove the snakes from Ireland. The Irish may wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, but on St. Urho’s Day the Finns wear green and purple, too. Chances are good they’ll be listening today to the music of Viola Turpeinen, the legendary Finnish American accordionist who lived here in Lake Worth in the 1950s. She called her house “the home that polka built.” Unelma Valssi is a favorite Viola Turpeinen recording: “Dream Waltz.” So fitting for a spring day in Lake Worth or in Lapland or in Michigan, where she was born in 1909. It’s the kind of music that floats out onto the air through the open windows in this gentle season and lulls us all to springtime dreaming.

Image: Viola Turpeinen and her accordion.

 

Mar 14 2017
22 Comments
St. Joseph's Day, St. Patrick's Day, St. Urho's Day, Transitions

May You Feel the Angels Bend Closer When You Call (Or, Three Saints’ Days)

So I’ve discovered what many of you may already know: there are no hard and fast rules for grieving. I find myself mostly going through my days, doing what needs doing, but feeling a bit like my gears are not aligned quite right. Inspiration is tough to come by, as is enthusiasm. There are certain things lately that make me uneasy: suburban Delray Beach, hospitals in general (I had to visit one last week for a medical test, and it felt a bit too soon), and straws: I unwrapped so many straws for my father in the last few weeks of his life, sometimes six or seven in a visit. Protein shake, orange juice, ginger ale, water… for each I would carefully tear the paper wrap from around the middle of the straw, remove one end of the wrapper while I held the other, then put the straw into his drink and remove the rest of the paper. It’s fine if my drink arrives at my table with a straw already in it, but there was an instance two weeks ago where my waitress brought me a drink and a straw on the side and as I went through those same motions again––tearing the paper, holding one end while removing the paper at the other––well… suddenly it felt too soon for straws, too.

But life goes on, of course. We’ve had quite a few celebrations with family and friends, honoring my dad, for even a funeral is a celebration of life. It is one of the ceremonies of our days, a hugely important one, I’ve found. And Dad, I’m sure he was shaking his head sometimes at his kid who was encouraging him to celebrate ancient Roman holidays and the birthdays of those who have passed. He always went along with our ways, though, maybe only because he liked a good meal. This week, though, we come to some celebrations he really enjoyed, and these will be the first traditional holiday celebrations we’ll have where he won’t be seated at the table. That will be strange, I know. But we will get through that strangeness, and we will raise our glasses to him, and we will conjure his presence as best we can. One foot in front of the other. It is what we do.

And so this week come three saints’ days: St. Patrick’s Day, the day when everyone is at least a little bit Irish; St. Urho’s Day, for the Finns; and St. Joseph’s Day, when we Italians feast (imagine that)… but mainly on one very particular pastry, the zeppole.

The day before St. Patrick’s Day, 1974, my mom and dad and sister flew from New York to Chicago to my Aunt Anne and Uncle Joe’s house. I was already there, a stowaway on the train that my grandparents had taken the week before. My dad arrived dressed head to toe in green: green leisure suit (it was 1974, after all), green shirt, green socks, and patent leather and suede green shoes. A woman in the elevator at O’Hare cried out, “He’s even got green shoes!” He was probably wearing green underwear, too.

Our St. Patrick’s Day celebrations since then mostly revolve around corned beef and cabbage and soda bread. My sister, through and through Italian, makes one mean soda bread. Now there’s something I’m looking forward to this week, and I’m sure it will inspire my mom to say what she always says about soda bread: “Why do we have to have this just once a year?” (She says the same about the Pan de Muertos we make each November for Dia de Muertos.)

For St. Joseph’s Day, we will have zeppole: dough, sometimes fried, sometimes baked, filled with custard and cherries. Sometimes we get sfinci, the same dough, but filled instead with a sweet ricotta cream, like they use in cannoli. I have to admit we’ve had quite a few already. When we were in New York last week for my father’s burial, cousins inundated us with Italian pastries, and already there were zeppole and sfinci, even in early March. The 19th of March, though, is St. Joseph’s Day, and this is the proper day to eat them.

Before both St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day, though, comes St. Urho’s Day on the 16th. Urho is a fictional saint, and you have to be Finnish or amongst Finns to know him. I know him only because I live here in Lake Worth, home to more Finns than anywhere but Finland. How do these things happen, I wonder? Why did so many Finns come to this town? The Finns love cardamom and smoked salmon and saunas and so many of our local homes have saunas in them because of them. And some of these very same Finns will be celebrating St. Urho, the saint who drove the grasshoppers from Finland. If this sounds a lot like the guy who drove the snakes from Ireland, well… that’s the point of this fictional saint whose day comes just before that of the more famous Patrick.

It’s been decided the family will gather here at our house for St. Patrick’s Day dinner, which means I’ll be doing the cooking, and then at my family’s home for St. Joseph’s Day dinner, and this makes me happy, that even in loss and grieving, we can come together and celebrate. There are the things that make me uneasy lately but also just as many things that carry me forward: the love I feel from family and friends, all of you included. Your words of kindness have been like a raft for me. Some music has helped me, too. My mom remembers in times of mourning when she was a kid that even listening to the radio was forbidden, but one day not long after Dad died when I was at home at my house and she was at home in hers, we were speaking on the phone and she told me to put on some music. I did. It was the new Jane Siberry recording that my nephew gave me for Christmas, the one I hadn’t opened yet. My friend Kelly suggested it was time, and she was right. It’s called Angels Bend Closer, and it, too, has been a raft for me to float upon. It was five years between this and Jane’s last major recording release, and in that space of time, she lost her father, too, and her mother. So she gets it. She always does. Dipped just a bit in darkness and melancholy, still this collection of songs is nothing but uplifting. Jane reminds me over and over again that I always have and always will be well. Perhaps you need that reminder, too.

Image: Mom and Dad at our St. Patrick’s Day dinner table, 2008. My sister brought the hats.

 

Mar 17 2016
2 Comments
St. Patrick's Day

Céad míle fáilte

Fairyhouse

A hundred thousand welcomes! That’s the translation from the Gaelic of the title of today’s chapter, a traditional Irish toast, quite proper for today, St. Patrick’s Day. There will be a lot of toasting today, to be sure. St. Patrick is sacred to Ireland, and as they say, everyone is at least a little Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. In this house, we’ll be eating the traditional corned beef and cabbage and soda bread, though oysters or shepherd’s pie or bangers and mash would be just as traditional. Take your pick. The day is widely celebrated with the wearing of the green and plenty of iconic imagery: shamrocks, harps, and shillelaghs, leprechauns and pots o’gold.

Patrick was a fourth century saint. He was born in Britain but was captured as a young man and taken to Ireland as a slave. He eventually escaped, made his way by sea to Gaul and became a priest there. He was made a bishop and soon after began to have visions suggesting he return to Ireland to spread the faith, which he did. One story tells of how he explained the Holy Trinity to the people of Ireland through the three leaves of the shamrock. He is most famous, however, for driving the snakes from Ireland. Whether it be by the hand of Patrick or not, there are to this day no snakes in Ireland, at least not in the wild. Some, however, think the story of Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland is more a metaphor for his driving the old Celtic gods and goddesses from the island, replacing the Old Ways with Christian beliefs.

But Ireland is a place of mystery, and if the story of St. Patrick and the snakes is indeed about the Old Ways and not about snakes, then it’s not true that they’re completely driven away, for there are plenty of these old mysteries still at play there, and some of the most fascinating stories, I think, revolve around the fairy folk: the stuff of legend, and yet there are those who firmly believe in the stories and their power. And St. Patrick’s Day, in particular, is a day that is best celebrated with stories and poems and songs of this place. So make your traditional Irish dinner, and pour some Jameson’s or some Guinness or Harp. But be sure, too, there is fiddle music, and something to read or recite.

Here in town tonight, over at St. Bernard’s, in the rectory after his meal, Father Seamus will certainly be pouring a glass of something and reciting Yeats. He is a man who loves to recite poetry to the congregation, and William Butler Yeats, the great poet of his long-ago homeland, is one of his favorites. Tonight, it could be any of his poems of Ireland. Seamus knows so many of them by heart, and perhaps tonight it will be this one:

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

The poem is “The Stolen Child.” Father Seamus loves it because it reminds him so intensely of the home he left behind when he crossed the western ocean and came to America. And as much as he loves it here, Ireland is always in his heart, and the world, he knows, is indeed full of weeping. St. Patrick’s Day is bittersweet for Seamus. Fairy folk are fewer and farther between here, and sometimes he feels a bit himself like a stolen child, removed from his homeland. But tonight, Seamus gets to celebrate that place. We all do, because we’re all Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Céad míle fáilte!

 

This chapter of the Convivio Book of Days is a re-worked version of one published originally for St. Patrick’s Day, 2014. The image then and the image today is of a fairy house I stumbled upon at the base of a tree in a woods in Maine some years ago. Certainly some fairy folk exist there, too. Good to know.

 

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