I don’t know how many Italian-Americans still celebrate it (or ever did), but when I was young, our neighbors always had a big celebration. It was more of a “food, family, beer and bocce” type celebration, rather than the “Flag down a cop car and vomit green beer into the front seat when he rolls down his window” type.
So, to anyone who’s celebrating today, Buona Fiesta di San Giuseppe!
I’m not Italian but we always celebrated St. Joseph’s Day (I grew up in New Jersey.). Of course, I’m not Irish either, and we always celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. I was raised Catholic, though, and St. Joseph’s Day held special meaning in our house as it is my father’s name day, and it was also my parents anniversary (they got special permission to marry in a Catholic church in, ummm, the Bronx I think, since they were both about to be deployed to the Philippines. They both served in the Air Force, where they met.)
Anyway, we’d always eat St. Joseph’s cream puffs for dessert, and it was a tradition I carried down to my children.
The first year I moved out here, I called every single bakery here in Santa Rosa, then most of them in North Beach in SF looking for them with no luck, I think it might be more of a NY/NJ thing. I still haven’t seen them out here in any of the local bakeries, and as my kids got older, I stopped looking in North Beach, not really worth a 40 minute one-way drive in traffic for a couple of cream puffs.
I guess I could always make them myself. Maybe next year.
Today is the day that the swallows come back to Capistrano (as in the song, When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano). I don’t know if it goes national, but the local news stations in Southern California always send reporters out to make reports. (Of course, they never send reporters out on the 17th or 18th, so we don’t really know …
I mentioned him yesterday at the end of the St Patrick’s day thread: link
I went to Catholic school, and our nuns were of the order Sisters of St. Joseph, so we always got St. Joesph’s Day as a day off from school!
My mother’s confirmation saint is St. Joseph, because she was born on St. Joseph’s day.
Happy birthday mom. (no, she’s not a member here AFAIK and yes, I’m calling her in just a few minutes).
