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This Singing Grandmother Will Restore Your Faith in Celebrating St. Patrick's Day

St. Paddy's is, in fact, one of the worst days you could possibly choose to go out to a bar and drink with your pals. It's a day when your favorite watering hole transforms into a cesspool of terrible humans. Luckily, this video of an older (maybe...
Photo via Flickr userNico Kaiser

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In every American city I've lived in, Saint Patrick's Day is a drinking holiday. I've never celebrated it in Ireland, so I'm going to write this with the American understanding of Irish revelry on this day.

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With that in mind, it's also worth noting that St. Paddy's is, in fact, one of the worst days you could possibly choose to go out to a bar to drink with your friends. Much like on Cinco de Mayo, you may find your local watering holes filled up with people who don't habitually get plastered on weeknights. The weekend warriors and part-time drunks simply don't know how to behave. Your local dimly lit dive bar—with its comfortable seats and mahogany walls—has transformed into a sausage fest full of green-clad douchebags ordering shots of Jameson and then puking in the bathroom, a space now covered with dollar store shamrock decorations and vomit.

In short, it sucks.

Luckily, we have Mary Gordon to transform your holiday altogether. I stumbled upon this video during one of my late night YouTube rabbit hole adventures. At the time, I believe that I was looking through videos uploaded directly from phones that contained no descriptions and were completely unedited. I found something remarkably captivating about the lo-fi recording, Gordon's beautiful voice, and the flickering light of the citronella candles placed around the scene, signaling that this is a perfect summer evening for a serenade from a drunk grandmother.

I've watched this video as comfort-viewing probably 50-plus times, which is upsetting because there are currently only 141 views on this upload. When I come home from a night of drinking, I use this video as a palate cleanser to help me forget about the aforementioned douchebags ruining my local bars.

Mary Gordon is a reminder that there is a mature side to getting drunk on Irish whiskey, and that it is beautiful. (Note the empty bottles on the table beside her.)

I'm sharing this with you now so that when you get home tonight and need something—besides the alcohol—to send you off to sleep, this video will help you erase the visual nightmares you just witnessed. All you have to do is click play and close your eyes.

If only there were an auto-replay option on YouTube.