The Holyoke St. Patrick’s parade is the second largest in the world and a focal point of the Paper City’s calendar. The issue with the Colleen Contest, as it currently exists, comes from a continued pattern of blatant misjudgement by the judges, who are meant to be impartial, and are brought in from outside of Holyoke.

These foreign judges create the recurring post-pageant talk of who got bumped out of a spot on the court on any given year and it opens up the pageant to a lot of criticism from those who actually know the city of Holyoke and know people within the city who exemplify characteristics of what a colleen should be. The problem is, in a contest like this, shouldn’t there be an element of familiarity with both the candidates and with Holyoke?  And this familiarity is not lacking anywhere in the city of Holyoke. In an “everybody knows everybody” type city like Holyoke, having strangers pick other strangers to lead our parade, just seems.. kind of.. well.. strange.  

On the surface there’s two problems with the format of the colleen contest, that came into action in 1961, when the parade committee decided that newspaper voting was no longer an effective way to choose a candidate.

• Problem number one: each contestant is granted a five minute interview with the judges the morning of the contest. They’re each asked questions based on their applications and resumes. So not only are the contestants originally subjected to an unequal opportunity due to variances in their resumes, but five minutes is an incredibly short time to decide who is going to represent the entire city of Holyoke through the entire St. Patrick’s day season!
• Problem number two: the judges. Expecting someone to choose a colleen; the face of the parade, Holyoke’s representation on a float, and know a person who consistently demonstrates pride in their city (the city of Holyoke) if you don’t know the city of Holyoke!

I’m all for impartiality, but the colleen contest is very clear about its status as “not a beauty pageant,” and to think that you can spend five minutes with someone and judge their character and the amount of pride they have for a city that you know nothing about is absurd.

Lurking below the surface are a series of other flaws with the pageants format. To start, the pageant allows contestants from Holyoke’s neighbor city, South Hadley. This year four of the five girls in the colleen’s court, including the grand colleen, are from South Hadley. Only one of the girls, Holyoke High senior Grace Hamel, is actually from Holyoke. It may not seem like a huge problem to those on the outside looking in (like, for example those involved from South Hadley), but to many people in Holyoke, this is a huge issue.

Our final flaw in the pageant is the most fundamental flaw of the contest. Since the beginning, what the colleen contest is has never been clearly defined. The contest is very clear about what it’s not: its not a beauty pageant. Past that, the rest is open for interpretation, when it really shouldn’t be. If I were to lay out a criteria I’d say the colleen should be:

1. Someone who demonstrates pride in their Irish heritage. This is another one that the parade committee has laid out. Each contestant must be able to show that they are of Irish descent. Whether or not they show pride in that heritage consistently well that’s up to the judges to decide in, let me remind you, five minutes.
2. Someone who shows pride in the city of Holyoke. This one’s obvious. The colleen, the representative of our city, should show pride in OUR city. I’m sure the girls from South Hadley have a lot of pride for their city, but that’s irrelevant! The Holyoke Colleen should show pride in Holyoke. I don’t think anything could be more black and white than that.
3. Demonstrates service within the city. The colleen should be a role model. Much like any other figure in the public eye, you want your colleen to be someone that you, as a citizen of Holyoke are proud to have represent you in the parade.
4. Demonstrates scholarship. The colleen should be a scholarly person, for no reason other than the fact that it’s an award and these are all incredibly reasonable criteria to merit earning an award.

• And to be eligible: Girls between seventeen and twenty-three, from Holyoke, who can demonstrate legitimate Irish descent.

It’s as simple as that folks. Widen the age range and specify what a colleen is. Once we do that the ball is in the parade committees court to promote the contest. The following in Holyoke is huge! People want to do it, but they need to know about it.  Put it in the paper, and on the news. Let the eligible girls in Holyoke know how fun this could be, and how important it is. After that we have no need to allow anyone else in.

I don’t want this article to be made out to look like I don’t like South Hadley, or like any four of  these girls wouldn’t be good candidates for a South Hadley colleen, if they had one. I don’t know these girls enough to say anything against them, and chances are the judges don’t either. All we can say for certain is that they shouldn’t be the Holyoke colleen, because they’re not from Holyoke! The fact of the matter is, having the centerpiece of our parade be from a different city, just doesn’t make any sense. It’s like having a British Miss America.

To be clear, this whole spiel isn’t intended to be xenophobic. It’s based on the fact that, in the same way that someone from England doesn’t understand the nationalism surrounding the Miss America pageant (that I assume people who care about the Miss America pageant feel?), someone from South Hadley doesn’t really understand what the parade and this colleen means to Holyoke.

To Holyokers this isn’t just something to put on their resume, and it’s unsettling to see some people come over the bridge and treat it as such. Holyokers, and I mean real Holyokers, generations deep, eat, breathe, and sleep this weekend and all that comes along with it. And those people will know exactly what I’m talking about if they read this. It’s a uniquely Holyoke thing, you either understand what it means, or you don’t. There’s no grey areas. No room for interpretation.

I haven’t written any solutions other than the criteria above – criteria that in all likelihood won’t be adopted. Other than that, we’re still left with a bit of a convoluted judging situation, and essentially a pageant walk-through that doesn’t give anyone a real idea of who the colleen should be. Well, listen close, because Matt’s going to fix that. If you don’t want to keep the screwy judging system then…GO BACK TO NEWSPAPER VOTING!! Or, perhaps, an advantage to the previous committees, we have something called the internet that makes everything you could possibly want to do way easier! In this day and age you’re telling me you can’t regulate how many times someone votes? If you want to go all out have people designated  to making sure people are limited on votes.

The colleen is the representation of Holyoke in, for the last time, OUR St. Patricks day parade, so in traditional democratic fashion our representation should reflect our voice, not the voice of people who know nothing about this city and nothing about these girls.

I think people are sick of walking away from the pageant year after year thinking “so and so should’ve gotten picked.” Its biased, but that’s because it should be. There’s people and peoples’ families that you know in Holyoke that deserve to be colleen. People who are Holyoke to the bone and deserve to be on that float, something that no one from over the river can claim to be true of them.

This is where it gets crazy; has anyone in South Hadley ever been proud enough to want their own representation in the parade? A float with a big tiger on it? It just seems strange that a fair few of you can move out of Holyoke to a “better” city, but not be proud enough to fly your own flag, so to speak. Maybe they could have their own parade committee and their own float and their own colleen, like almost every other city in Western Mass. I don’t think it’s too outlandish of a proposition to want to keep a more authentic Holyoke nostalgic feel to our parade (sorry I know I promised I’d stop with the “our parade” thing).

That’s it. It almost doesn’t even merit an article because its so black and white, but since the 60’s we’ve had it all wrong. Maybe we’ll get it right in the future, or maybe it’ll stay the same. Either way you know that we, in Holyoke, celebrate St. Patricks day better than anyone else in the world. Make sure you come out to see the Parade on March 22nd in Holyoke, it’s sure to be a great time. Happy St. Patricks Day to all and to all a good Paddy’s Day weekend!