If you are like me, you proudly support all the rich Irish traditions on the 17th of March in respect to celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. However some of you probably don’t know that the namesake of our son, Oisín, has traditional significance on this holiday as well. Oisín is a sort of the ficticious pagan counterpart to St. Patrick’s Catholic significance in Ireland:

Oisín was the son of Fionn Mac Cumhal and was a warior like his father who spent his days protecting the shores of Ireland. One day a faerie woman (Niamh–sounds like KNEE-uhv) came to confront the fighters and asked for a worthy husband. Oisín was selected, and he rode away with his faerie bride on the back of her horse. They traveled to her home, Tir na nOg (the land of the young, sort of like Valhalla, heaven or Olympus) and lived together for some time. While there, Oisín grew homesick and wished to return to Ireland to see his family. Niamh tried to convince him not to go, but when she couldn’t, she told Oisín that he should ride her horse, and not touch the ground himself. When he returned to Ireland, he realized that the time he had spent in Tir na nOg had moved much slower than time back in Ireland. His family were long dead and gone, and he realized that he did not recognize Ireland as it was when he had left it. While he was visiting, he slipped off his horse and immediately aged to his propper old age. It was at this point that his conversations with St. Patrick where to have taken place. St. Patrick found Oisín roaming the land and attempted to convert him to Christianity. Oisín supposedly spent his time conversing with St. Patrick by explaning the old customs from his youth and from his time in Tir na nOg to him.

This information is a loose summary of all the things I’ve read and heard since we decided to name our first born Oisín. William Butler Yeats wrote a narrative poem titled Wanderings of Oisin in which which also describes this information elloquently.
Go n’eirigh an bothar leat!
(May the road rise to meet you)