Tag Archives: family

   Thank you Kristin for wishing us all the best of the day.  And for allowing this place to be the shout out venue for Irish family members everywhere.  My father’s father’s family came to New York, via the ever popular jumping off point of County Cork.  The stories we always heard were that they lost the O on the boat ride over, or maybe they were horse thieves and were asked to live elsewhere and leave their dignified O with the motherland.  The name Hanavan, does not appear anywhere on Irish soil.  O’Hanifin, O’Hanegin, and various other spellings of similar names do.  We know that anyone with the name Hanavan is related to us.  The two brothers that got off the boat (minus their O’s) parted later, one going west.  (For those of you who wonder why The Hurricane’s name is spelled the way it is: Hanna, it’s because I wanted to get as close to Hanavan as I could.  While still allowing her some sort of semblance of normality.  It didn’t work, but I tried.  And that’s the reason why she is who she is.)

     When I was growing up we always celebrated the day with corned beef and cabbage, potatoes and carrots (I don’t eat onions, so now my mother omits those for me).  She also would sometimes cook enchiladas on or close to that day, to honor her Mexican heritage (she is the world’s worst Mexican, but she tries when we ask her to, so that’s always nice).  As we got older, we were encouraged to stay home for this festive of all Irish evenings.  My dad (the actual Irishman of our tribe of five) called it Amateur’s Night (he still does).  Just after I had all three children I read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “The Mists of Avalon” (we will hear from my son on this topic, I forced him to read it when he was in high school, the poor guinea pig kid got the full force of my militaristic paganism).  Since that information was shown to me (fictionalized or not) I have never felt the same way about this holiday.  See, she describes the native Celt’s version of what St Patrick (and the followers of that religion) did, there never were real snakes on the island, there were families who had names like Pendragon, and THOSE were the ones he “drove off” (translation: slaughtered).  It’s kind of like how Dan Brown takes tons of real history and makes it into a novel with much of the facts, but with much fiction to make the story work.  Since I do see past lives and converse with dead people, I know how much of that heathen killing is true.  (Way too much.)  I do honor my heritage.  All of it (the Cherokee, the Mexican, the Irish), but I can’t take all the commercialism, nor tolerate green beer.  Enjoy your beverages wisely, and try to avoid the amateurs.  Celebrate who you are.