March 17 is celebrated throughout the United States and Ireland as St. Patrick’s Day. On St. Paddy’s Day, as it is familiarly known, we wear green, eschew orange and drink gallons of green beer. (Yuck!) We hold parades, dye entire rivers green, and generally behave in a very un-saintly fashion.

St. Patrick: A Brief History (with a little guesswork thrown in)

St. Patrick himself is a figure shrouded in some mystery. He probably lived during the 5th century, and was a Roman Briton from a well-to-do family. When he was about 16 years old he was kidnapped and brought to Ireland where he was a shepherd for about 6 years. At the end of that time, ostensibly after having a God-inspired vision, he escaped and made his way to the coast where he was able to catch a boat for home.

After his arrival home, his Christian faith strengthened by his experience, he undertook religious training which continued over the next 15 years. He returned to Ireland after his ordination as a priest, with the mission of converting the heathen Irish and ministering to the Christians already there. Patrick served the Irish Christian community until his death and is considered to be the patron saint of Ireland. Definitely a missionary expat, then!

St. Patrick is credited with driving all the snakes out of Ireland, although there is no evidence there ever were snakes there. The snakes could be a metaphor for the druidic religion which he undermined. Ireland was completely Christianized by about 200 years after Patrick’s death.

After living among the Irish during the six years of his captivity, Patrick understood the language and the culture. Ever the canny missionary, Patrick craftily superimposed Christian symbols and rituals onto the existing pagan symbology instead of trying to eliminate the pagan Irish symbols and practices. For example, he took the sun, a powerful symbol of Irish pagan belief, and added it to the Christian cross, creating the Celtic Cross we still see today.

St. Patrick’s death is popularly believed to have been on March 17. After his canonization, Irish Catholics celebrated the anniversary of his death as a saint’s day with feasting (and drinking!) despite it’s occurrence during Lent.

St. Patrick’s Day Today

Today we associate St. Patrick’s Day with shamrocks, leprechauns and Irish nationalism.

• The shamrock was an important pagan symbol of spring. Patrick supposedly used it to teach lessons about the three-in-one nature of his Christian God. During the 17th century, the Irish started to use the shamrock as a symbol of their heritage and history and their dislike of English rule. Today it’s considered good luck, and a symbol of Irish nationalism.
• The leprechaun we know today is really an American invention, loosely based on Irish tales of the fairies or the “little people.” The original of the Irish fairy tale was a crafty, tricky, not very pleasant looking character who could (and often did) cause humans a lot of misery and confusion and was obsessed with gold and wealth. According to history.com, they were not associated with St. Patrick or his day until after Walt Disney released a film called Darby O’Gill & The Little People, which featured the cute, harmless little leprechauns we recognize today.
• Irish nationalism is symbolised by the shamrock and the color green. In the Irish flag, the green stripe represents the Irish Catholics while the Orange stripe represents the English Protestants. Wearing orange on St. Patrick’s Day is an insult to any true Irishman. We even make sure our canine companions comply.
  

  Saint Patrick’s Day Parades

  The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade took place, not in Ireland, but in New York City in 1762 when a group of Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched on March 17. By 1848, several Irish societies combined to form the official New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The New York City parade is the oldest civilian parade in the world, and the largest US parade with about 150,000 participants lasting 5 hours.

  And while Americans were lifting a glass to St. Paddy, over in Ireland the pubs were closed on his day until the 1970s.

  The website st-patricks-day.com lists parades in 45 US states and the District of Columbia (Alaska, Idaho, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia don’t participate), as well as Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, most of the European countries (France is the notable exception), as well as China, Japan, Singapore, Tainwan, Korea and Dubai.

  

Guest Post by Kathleen Peddicord, Overseas Retirement Letter

If you haven’t yet taken action toward realizing your dreams of a new life in retirement abroad, I say now, get moving.

Many Overseas Retirement Letter readers have taken off for new and exotic lives in the overseas retirement havens that called their names (and we share some of their stories with subscribers in the current issue). What’s holding you back?

I can imagine many things. Over the years, we’ve struggled with our own Reasons Not To Move Overseas. In fact, we’ve probably had more reasons than most not to push ahead with our various international escapades, for our situation has been complicated.

Lief and I met in June 1997 on a real estate tour of Ireland (that I was leading). We both happened to be on that fated expedition as part of research in advance of moves to the Emerald Isle that we both, coincidentally, planned to execute by the end of the year.

At the time, Lief was living in Chicago; I was based in Baltimore. We were engaged to be married in September and wed in November. All the while continuing with our relocation plans for December.

Who couldn’t talk him- (or her-) self out of an international move under those circumstances? Certainly, nearly everyone we knew thought we’d taken leave of our senses.

Including my then 9-year-old daughter. Kaitlin wanted no part of any life other than the one she’d been enjoying in Maryland, where she had friends and family, including a grandmother she visited nearly every day.

The grandmother (my mother) wasn’t big on our international relocation plan either. When, the day before our departure, she stopped by my house so I could give her the foodstuffs and other things I’d packed into a couple of boxes for her, she remarked, tearfully, “Oh, how can you give away all your teas? Can’t you take these with you?”

I was more concerned about leaving my antique furniture behind, so I invested in shipping a container load of it to Dublin, where it then had to be stored for a year before we were ready to take delivery of it in Waterford.

Lief wasn’t able to sell his house in Chicago before our December move date, so we had to continue paying the mortgage on it the first several months we were living in Ireland.

The morning we were to take off for our grand newlywed adventure overseas, Kaitlin lay on her bed, holding her grandmother’s hand, and sobbing. “Please don’t make me leave,” she pleaded. “I’m an American. I belong in America.” Her cries continued for our first full year abroad.

Lief and I pushed ahead, in the face of Kaitlin’s reluctance, in the face of my family’s misgivings, in the face of financial complications and setbacks, in the face of our own uncertainties. We organized the shipping of my furniture and the sale of Lief’s. We sold both our cars. We researched Waterford schooling options for Kaitlin. We parted with personal belongings, longtime friends, family, and co-workers. On the face of it, we abandoned everything…except each other and our dream.

It was not easy. Life in Waterford was not perfect. Some of our friends and family still don’t understand, all these years later, why we ever made the move, and I can’t, even now, articulate a response that makes sense to them. Perhaps you will understand. We wanted to see what we might see. We wanted to glimpse how people live somewhere else. We wanted a chance to understand how life in a new place would be different and the same from the lives we’d
known.

We perceived so much benefit from that first move from Baltimore to Waterford that we enthusiastically embraced a second one, about seven years later, this time to Paris. Then, last summer, we relocated again, to Panama.

Looking back now, I see many points along the way when we easily could have talked ourselves into staying put. We’ve gotten tired. We’re worried about the children. We’ve been overwhelmed by frustrations resulting from the different ways people do things in different places around the world. But this is the point, isn’t it, we’ve had to remind ourselves…to discover how the rest of the world works.

We’ve addressed all the questions one must address when undertaking these kinds of adventures: What stuff should we ship? Which health care plan is best for our family? Where should the children be educated? Should we rent our new home or buy one? What about the pets? Are we doing the kids a disservice by taking them so far from their extended families? What if they don’t like their new home? What if we don’t?

Here’s the lesson I’ve learned as a result of all the research and planning that’s gone into all our globe-trotting over these past dozen years: You can’t over-think this. Thinking has its place, but then action is called for. You’ll always be able to second-guess your plan and to rationalize walking away from it.

Moving to a new country–on your own, with your family, whatever your circumstances–requires courage and conviction. It means ignoring the nay-sayers and your own doubts. Practically speaking, it demands persistence and high energy levels.

More than anything, though, executing a move to another country requires a naïve faith in your own ability to work things out and to make things work. You can’t possibly imagine and plan for all possible contingencies and eventualities. You’ve got to trust that you’ll be good on your feet.

So, again, I propose a resolution: Start now. Put the planning, the research, and the thinking aside. Muster the self-conviction to follow your heart. Your new life overseas won’t be easy, and it won’t be perfect. It will come with a set of challenges and frustrations that you can’t begin to imagine right now. So stop trying.

Because, I tell you, it’s worth it. I can’t articulate an explanation that satisfies my family back in Baltimore, but I can tell you that I don’t regret one day or one move of the past dozen years. Our experiences have been broad, our lives and those of our children have been enriched, and our memories are diverse and comforting. Each step executed (successfully or sometimes not) has given us the confidence to take the next one.

From Baltimore, Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States to the Irish countryside. From there to the City of Light, then, last summer, back across the Atlantic to the Hub of the Americas, where we now reside in a 150-year-old Spanish-colonial house in this city’s old town, Casco Viejo.

Where from here? I couldn’t tell you with certainty, but I can’t wait to find out.

And I believe that you’ll enjoy the same sense of childlike anticipation and delight as you make your way down your own path overseas…wherever it leads you.

So what are you waiting for?

Used by permission. To see more of Kathleen’s wisdom, visit Live and Invest Overseas.

If your overseas move will include doing business, the World Bank has just published a list that might help you narrow your search. According to their annual Doing Business report, the countries most favorable to starting a small- to medium-sized business are:

1. Singapore

2. New Zealand
3. United States
4. Hong Kong
5. Denmark
6. United Kingdom
7. Ireland
8. Canada
9. Australia
10. Norway

Obviously, ease of starting a business is not the only criterion for choosing where in the world to live, but if you have years of your working life ahead of you, it’s something to consider. With the exception of Singapore, all the other countries on the list are in Europe and North America.