St. Patrick's Day 2014

Let's just start this post off with a little background on my family.  As long as I can remember my mom has made it a point to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and not in the way you probably are thinking.  We celebrate by dying EVERYTHING green.  I love St. Patrick's Day!  I don't even understand the people who can't even wear green?? Get it together peeps!  Once I even told Brian that those people were NOT patriotic.  He had to remind me that only refers to America, not Ireland since we don't live there haha.

My mom would wake us up on St. Patrick's Day by playing Bing Crosby's McNamara's (MacNamara's) Band.  Look it up if you've never heard that song.  Bet you don't have an Irish song, do you?? Oh and did I mention there is a McNamara Castle in Ireland?  We claim that as well.  So yes, we are Irish and proud of it!  So to start our St. Patrick's Day we would have green eggs and green pancakes.  Not always that appealing to the eye, but still delicious!

Nothing special for lunch because we were at school, but dinner was guaranteed to be green.  Our traditional meal on St. Patrick's day is not Irish food.  Apparently, real Irish food is pretty bland, so we always had my mom's fried chicken, green mashed potatoes, green beans, salad, green homemade rolls, and sprite with green food coloring.  For dessert we either had a green cake or green jello.  Mom always went a little crazy with the food coloring, but it made the best memories for the kids :)

In true McNamara form, I made our traditional St. Patrick's Day meal last night :)  I know it's just the two of us, but I still like to re-live those wonderful memories of my childhood.  So thank you, mom, for the memories!

those mashed potatoes tasted great btw! 
the dye doesn't affect the taste :)

We had just worked out hence my lovely dinner outfit

I love to make cut out cookies for all holidays!

Since all my family was out of town on actual St. Patrick's Day, we did an impromptu food dying session with my brother and his girlfriend and her friend on Saturday night.  We dyed our grape juice green and made shamrock shaped brownies to go with my baked ziti :)