St. Patrick`s Day
On March 17, people around the world celebrate the Irish holiday of Saint Patrick's Day. It is the one day a year where everyone is a little bit Irish.
The patron saint of Ireland was born to wealthy parents in Scotland in the late 4th century. Until the age of 16, he thought of himself as a pagan. Later the boy was kidnapped and sold as a slave by Irish marauders. After being a slave for six years he managed to escape and then studied in a monastery in Gaul for 12 years. St. Patrick understood that his 'calling' was to try and convert all the pagans in Ireland to Christianity. That`s why he went around Ireland founding monasteries and successfully converting people to Christianity. Of course, the Celtic Druids were very unhappy with him. They tried to arrest him several times but he always managed to escape. After 30 years of being a missionary in Ireland, he finally settled down in County Down. He died on the 17th of March, AD 461.
The Church honored him with a holy day in the 17th century. In the early 1900s, Ireland's government made St. Patrick's Day an official holiday. In the past, this holiday wasn't a huge cause for celebration in Ireland. Families usually marked the holiday with a meal and little else. Today St. Patrick's Day is a four-day public celebration with people dancing and singing in Irish pubs, watching the parade and playing games, drinking 'green' beer, and eating special food (corned beef or pork and cabbage), wearing green clothes and just generally having a good time.
For Irish people living outside Ireland, Saint Patrick's Day became a chance to celebrate their Irish identity and culture. The U.S. is especially famous for its Saint Patrick's Day celebrations. Many cities with large ethnic Irish communities, like Boston, New York and Chicago, hold parades and parties. Cities usually colour local rivers green for the day. Famous monuments, such as the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum in Rome, the Niagara Falls, and the Gateway of India in Mumbai are also coloured by green light for the day.
Did you know?
- There are numerous theories as to why green became the color of this holiday. (historians say that St. Patrick's color was actually a pale blue) It is one of the colors on the Irish flag. Green also is the color of a shamrock, a symbol of Ireland -- known as the Emerald Isle. And traditional Irish legend says that wearing green makes you invisible to leprechauns. So if you have a chance to visit Ireland on 17 March, don't forget to wear green on this special day!
- The early Leprechauns made their first appearance in an eighth-century poem. But according to ancient tales they wore red jackets, laced with gold and they also had sported red, pointed hats (instead of green top hats with shamrocks) and white or brown beards (not ginger ones). They were unfriendly and untrustworthy. Leprechauns lived in an undersea kingdom in the Mid-Atlantic (says Tom O'Donnell).