Saint Patrick's day

Saint Patrick's Day is a cultural and religious celebration held on March 17. It commemorates the death of the patron saint of Ireland, who died on March 17, around 492. It is celebrated in countries with people of Irish descent.

Here are my top Saint Patrick's Day resources:

Source: National Geographic

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Source: the History Channel (Bet You didn't Know)

by Morrow in the Middle

TRANSCRIPT

Bet You Didn't Know - St. Patrick's Day

Millions of people around the world don their best green attire every March 17th to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. But there is a lot we bet you didn’t know about Ireland’s patron saint…

To start with, St. Patrick wasn’t even Irish. He was born around the fifth century in Britain, then part of the Roman Empire. At sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and spent 6 years in captivity. He converted to Christianity and later returned to Ireland to spend the rest of his life working as a Christian missionary. After Patrick died on March 17th 461, he was largely forgotten until mythology and legend grew. And centuries later he was honoured as the patron saint of Ireland.

According to one famous myth, Patrick drove all the snakes from Ireland. The story symbolized Patrick cleansing the island of paganism. There’s just one problem: Ireland never had any snakes, to begin with. The Emerald Isle is surrounded by water too frigid for snakes to migrate there, whether from Britain or anywhere else.

According to another famous story, Patrick used the three leaves of the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity. As a result, people in 18th-century Ireland started wearing shamrocks to signify their Irish pride. That tradition later grew into wearing green clothing, a popular St. Patrick’s Day custom today. Though shamrocks don’t really exist, we know them as any one of several three-leaf plants such as wood sorrel or white and yellow clover.

As important as St. Patrick is to Irish history, we bet you didn’t know the tradition of celebrating March 17th with parades actually started in America. The parade tradition really took off after the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland in the 1840s, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants pouring into New York, Boston and other American cities. The first record of a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York dates to 1762, when a group of Irish soldiers serving with the British marched a few blocks to a tavern in Lower Manhattan. Today it’s the largest and longest St. Patrick’s Day Parade, hosting close to 200,000 participants and nearly 3,000,000 spectators each year.

So this March 17th we hope you’ll be wearing green and toasting to some St Patrick’s Day history that we bet you didn’t know.

For more resources, go to:

Michelle Henry - Saint Patrick's Day