Lace Curtain Irish

Ireland is known for beautiful lush green landscapes, hard drinking pub patrons, potatoes, sheep, and lace. Today you can't travel around the Irish countryside without coming into constant contact with all of them, but this was not always the case. It was in the lean times of the great Irish potato famines (1845-1852) that many a farmwife took up the lace making trade to keep her family from starving. It was really from this outpouring of desperation that the Irish lace tradition sprung. While today it seems that every window in Ireland overflows with lace, for most of the 2nd half of the 19th century it was only the very wealthy that could afford such an extravagance. The poor seamstress in her cottage had to sell just about every piece she created just to stay alive. The lucky few who had the means to purchase curtains AND food gained the nickname, "lace curtain Irish". You can think of that as a euphemism for "high and mighty sons of bitches that think they are better than me."





Of course the Irish potato famines had much larger global effects than just bringing the world Irish lace. The population of Ireland dropped 20-30% over that 8 year period. Nearly two million people. The unlucky ones perished, mostly of starvation related disease, but roughly half left Ireland altogether in what has become known as the Irish Diaspora. As of today, something like 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent, half of which reside in the United States. This can be compared to the present population of Ireland of about 6 million people (coincidentally roughly the same population as in 1845, so you can see things didn't exactly turn around for the Irish post-Great Famine). To put it another way, people of Irish ancestry make up 15% of the U.S. population, second only to those of German descent (17%). I am not certain how much crossover there is between the two groups, but if my personal genetics are any indication it is 100%.



So back to the lace curtain Irish.

When the tidal wave of Irish immigrants began crashing onto American shores in the 1850s, they found that some Irish had proceeded them. As is sadly traditional among immigrants, the established, wealthier Irish looked down on their poorer, newly arrived cousins. The wealthy called them Shanty Irish, while the poor referred to the rich as lace curtain Irish, borrowing the term from home and applying it whether their snobby cousins had lace curtains or not.



While I trace my personal Irish genes back through several different lines, I believe
most of them to have been lace curtain Irish, i.e. they settled pre-Great Famine. For instance, despite several fascinating coincidences with the Colberts of the Chickasaw Nation, best research seems to put the oldest Colbert ancestor we can find living in Virginia back in the 1820s (Anthony Colbert, I believe. Sadly I don't have the extensive genealogy work my mother has done in front of me at the moment), with a homestead located on what is today the West Virginia/Virginia border. I don't take pride or shame in the lace curtain Irish title. I recognize that it was once a pejorative, but one now so faded by time that it only adds color to my family story.



So here are my girls, modern day lace curtain Irish. I guess we can reclaim that term in order to empower ourselves. Or we could just not take ourselves that seriously and enjoy little girls with shamrock hats running in and out of diaphanous lace. Yes, those are the same hats as last year (check out the Fight Cranial Panis Mica ad to the right). No, they don't really fit any more. I had to turn the hats inside out and upside before jamming them down on their heads. They seemed to like them. Hopefully the pressure from the hat won't stunt their skull growth (although that could be therapeutic... again, check the Fight Cranial Panis Mica ad). I always try to get (and post) equal numbers of photos of the girls, but in this instance Kayla was being quite coy, letting Rylie (in the darker green) take most of the spotlight.



So I expect some of you, if you are still reading my blog after such a long hiatus, would like to know more about the remodel. The short answer is that it is still not done, but we are close. If the present projections hold we should be able to start moving back in at the start of April. I will have much more info (and pictures) in a future post that hopefully will be more like 3-4 days from now, not two months.



Another great diaspora was that of the Jews, driven out multiple times from multiple places, although usually after the fall of a Temple. Lace curtain or not, that really makes my girls Double Diasporatic. And that means double tough. If you are smart, you do not mess with an Irish street tough. An Irish street tough Jew?

Fuggedaboutit.



Happy St. Patrick's Day!