About St. Patrick's Day
Saint Patrick's Day, on 17 March, is the feast day of Saint Patrick (c. 385-461), the missionary bishop who is credited with bringing Christianity to fifth-century Ireland. The historical Patrick was a Romano-Briton enslaved in Ireland as a young man, who escaped, was ordained, and returned as a missionary; his Confessio survives as one of the earliest autobiographical Christian texts from western Europe. The day was made an official public holiday in Ireland in 1903 and is also a public holiday in the Northern Ireland, the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Caribbean island of Montserrat (where Irish indentured servants and African captives shaped the population). Across the Irish diaspora — most prominently in the United States — it has grown into a major secular celebration of Irish identity that often eclipses the religious origin.
Green dominates everything — clothes, accessories, beer, baked goods, and the rivers themselves: Chicago dyes the Chicago River bright green every year. Parades fill cities from Dublin and Belfast to New York (the world's largest, dating to 1762), Boston, Chicago, Buenos Aires and Tokyo. Pints of Guinness, Irish stew, corned beef and cabbage, soda bread and Bailey's are eaten and drunk. In Ireland the day combines morning mass, the national parade through O'Connell Street in Dublin, family meals and music sessions in pubs; the bigger urban parades attract over half a million spectators. The traditional symbol is the shamrock — Patrick is said to have used the three-leafed clover to teach the Trinity. In Ireland, Northern Ireland and Newfoundland the pubs and shops were historically closed on the day; the restriction was lifted in Ireland in 1961 but the day remains the busiest of the year for Irish pubs worldwide.