For those who have forgotten, St. Patrick was a missionary and bishop who brought Catholicism to Ireland. He was not a pub owner and investor in Guinness who is the Irish version of St. Paulie Girl. No, St. Patrick did not create a day in his own honor for drunkenness and frivolity.

Seriously, there is no obligation to go out there and get drunk. There is no obligation to have your corned beef and cabbage. In fact, corned beef and cabbage isn’t really Irish. That’s just something Americans do. That should tell you just how much of our St. Patrick’s Day celebrations have gone off the rails.

Right now, many restaurants and bars have been ordered closed because of COVID19. That means for many they can’t even go out and be stupid even if they want. Actually, they still can, but their opportunities to do so are far more limited. That goes double when you consider every city has canceled their St. Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations.

If you want to have your corned beef and cabbage, chances are your grocery stores don’t have so much as a potato left, so good luck trying to fashion a traditional St. Patrick’s Day feast. Seeing everything closed and seeing how there has been a run on everything, everything we know to be true has been turned upside down and seems completely backwards.

Let’s embrace everything being backwards. Instead of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day on 3/17, let’s just reschedule it for 7/13.

On that day, we can resume our St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Assuming we are still not dealing with COVID19 (perhaps not an all together safe assumption), we can do our pub crawls and parades that weekend and celebrate St. Patrick’s day on July 13. In fact, if you think about it, July 11th would be a great day to do St. Patrick’s Day parades as that is the day of the end of the Irish War for Independence.

It may seem like a tenuous grab for a search for a date, and maybe it is. However, it is something, and it is something to look forward to celebrating. Honestly, what is better? Lamenting all the things we have lost due to COVID19, or finding new ways to celebrate things and creating things we can all enjoy in the future?

The Irish spirit is to persevere and to enjoy life. It is to love family and friends. Even in the face of COVID19 and it’s disruptions on our daily lives, we can still do that. In the meantime, let’s all be safe and healthy, and reschedule all the things in our lives so we may enjoy it all later.

Before we go, today more than any other day, let’s pick up a glass and toast each other saying Slainte, which translated from Gaelic means health.