FOLK HEARTH

Say Happy St. Patrick's: It Doesn’t Threaten Your Identity

Let’s get something straight right out of the gate:

Saying “Merry Christmas,” “Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” “Happy Hanukkah,” “Eid Mubarak,” or any other holiday greeting does not magically convert you, betray your beliefs, weaken your identity, or hand over your autonomy to someone else’s religion.

1. It’s a greeting.

2. It’s goodwill.

Everything You Know About Halloween Is Wrong

The familiar story—that Halloween is an ancient pagan festival called Samhain, barely disguised by Christianity—is not history. It is a modern invention built from speculation, mistranslation, and repetition. What follows is not a reinterpretation of the past, but a correction of a mistake that has been passed off as fact for over a century.

How the Idea Developed

1. Early Irish antiquarians (18th century)

One of the earliest figures to link ancient Irish festivals to later Christian holidays was Charles Vallancey. Vallancey produced highly speculative and often linguistically unsound works attempting to reconstruct Irish pagan religion from fragmentary sources, folklore, and conjectural etymologies. He suggested that many Irish customs preserved remnants of pre-Christian ritual life. While he never claimed that “Halloween was originally called Samhain,” his habit of loosely associating ancient festivals with later folk practices helped establish a framework in which such…