There are many awful, scary and intimidating things going on in the world today. Thus, many people are finding relief by focusing on the two holidays that coincided on March 17 this year, St. Patrick's Day and Purim. These are two very different holidays, even if both have a P in their names. 

St. Patrick's is the better known of the holidays: a celebration of Irish (especially Irish Catholic) heritage and culture. Purim is a very different tradition: a Jewish holiday centered around the reading of the biblical Book of Esther. The holiday commemorates a day when a rabid antisemite named Haman wished to have Jews throughout the Persian kingdom killed. But the tables were turned on Haman and his family, and while he was killed the Jews survived.

Food is obviously a big deal for St. Patrick's Day: corned beef and cabbage, Irish soda bread, and desserts dyed bright green are popular. Food is a very big deal for Purim as well: the tradition is to bake and eat triangular cookies (called Hamantaschen, "Haman's Ears" in Yiddish or "Oznay Haman" in Hebrew) filled with fruit jams, poppyseeds, chocolate or other stuff. Also popular is to give gifts of ready-to-eat food (especially sweets) to one another.

And for both holidays, drinking alcohol is popular. Another popular tradition is the parade. St. Patrick's Day parades are held in various places throughout the United States, and probably the preeminent one is that held on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In some communities there are formal Purim parades, although informal cavorting in costume, in synagogues or on streets in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, is more common.

Occasionally these two holidays have intersected. In 1984 they did (and here is an infamous video about it) and in some years they have been one or two days off (as in 2014). This year I know some people who baked green hamantaschen to commemorate this quirky intersection of cultures.

Music is important for both these holidays, but again, the music is quite different. Think of St. Patrick's and you hear bagpipes and drum corps. Purim is known for certain songs (one of the best known is "Chag Purim" or "Purim Day") and in many communities of Eastern and Central European Jews and their ancestors, the popular Purim music is typically Klezmer music, primarily featuring clarinet, drums, and a few other instruments. 

My ancestry is Eastern European Jewish (Polish and Belarussian) so obviously Purim has been a big deal for most of my life. I love the costumes, the public readings of Esther (and you make noise during them), the merriment and the sense of pride. But I get a kick out of St. Patrick's Day, and my daughters actually studied Irish Step dance for a few years when they were younger. And living in NYC, I am well aware of the pageantry that makes this Parade a big annual event.

Even with some mist and rain, NYC residents enjoyed these two holidays. Here's a hamantaschen recipe!