Saint Patrick's Day (Irish: Lá Fhéile Pádraig) colloquially St. Paddy's Day or simply Paddy's Day, is an annual feast day that celebrates Saint Patrick (circa AD 387–493), the most commonly recognised of the patron saints of Ireland, and is generally celebrated on 17 March.

The day is a national holiday of Ireland, a bank holiday in Northern Ireland and a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland. In United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland), Australia, New Zealand and Montserrat it is widely celebrated, while in the United States it is a public holiday.

St. Patrick's feast day was placed on the universal liturgical calendar in the Catholic Church due to the influence of the Waterford-born Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding in the early part of the 17th century, although the feast day was celebrated in the local Irish church from a much earlier date. St. Patrick's Day is a holy day of obligation for Roman Catholics in Ireland. The feast day usually falls during Lent. The church calendar avoids the observance of saints' feasts during certain solemnities, moving the saint's day to a time outside those periods. St. Patrick's Day is very occasionally affected by this requirement. Thus when 17th of March falls during Holy Week, as in 1940 when St. Patrick's Day was observed on 3 April in order to avoid it coinciding with Palm Sunday, and again in 2008, having been observed on 15 March. St. Patrick's Day will not fall within Holy Week again until 2160 - when it will fall on the Monday before Easter.

Who is St. Patrick?

St. Patrick was born as Maewyn Succat during the fourth century in Britain. His parents were very wealthy. His father was also a Christian deacon for tax incentive reasons. When Maewyn was about sixteen his family and their home was attacked by Irish raiders. Maewyn was kidnapped and forced to become a slave working as a shepherd in County Mayo in Ireland. It was during his time as a slave that he turned to God. He had a dream one night to escape the next day and travel back home to Britain. The next day he did just that and travelled the 200 miles back home to Britain. Once he returned, Maewyn had another religious dream. An angel told him to become a missionary and spread Christianity back in Ireland. He then spent the next fifteen years training to become a priest and chose Patrick as his Christian Saint name.

In 432 AD he went back to Ireland as a priest. He tried to convert the Irish people from a Pagan polytheistic religion that worshipped the sun and the moon to Christianity. He also created and taught at many schools along Ireland's west coast. One of his teaching methods included using the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity (the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit) to the Irish people. After nearly thirty years of teaching and spreading God's word he died on March 17th 461 AD. Soon after his death the country of Ireland decided to remember his death with a day of his own and thus St. Patrick's Day was born.

Wearing of green

Originally the color associated with St. Patrick was blue, not green. However over the years the color green and its association with St. Patrick's day grew. Green ribbons and shamrocks were worn in celebration of St Patrick's Day as early as the 17th century. He is said to have used the shamrock, a three-leaved plant, to explain the Holy Trinity to the pre-Christian Irish, and the wearing and display of shamrocks and shamrock-inspired designs have become a ubiquitous feature of the day. Then in 1798 in hopes of making a political statement Irish soldiers wore full green uniforms on March 17th in hopes of catching attention with their unusual fashion gimmick. The phrase "the wearing of the green", meaning to wear a shamrock on one's clothing, derives from the song of the same name.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the  Wikipedia article "Saint Patrick's Day". You can explore more on the Wikipedia website. The text and the images are used here only for educational purposes.

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