Saint Patrick's Day (Irish: Lá ’le Pádraig or Lá Fhéile Pádraig), colloquially St. Paddy's Day or Paddy's Day, is an annual feast day which celebrates Saint Patrick (circa 385–461), one of the patron saints of Ireland, and is generally celebrated on 17 March.
The day is the national holiday of the Irish people. It is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland, and a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Montserrat, and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In the rest of Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, it is widely celebrated but is not an official holiday.
It became a feast day in the Roman Catholic Church due to the influence of the Waterford-born Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding[2] in the early part of the 17th century, and is a holy day of obligation for Roman Catholics in Ireland. The date of the feast is occasionally moved by church authorities when March 17 falls during Holy Week; this last happened in 1940 when Saint Patrick's Day was observed on 3 April in order to avoid it coinciding with Palm Sunday, and will happen again in 2008, when it shall be held on 15 March for the novus ordo liturgy and April 2 for the traditional Latin Mass to avoid the second day in Holy Week.
Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated worldwide by Irish people and increasingly by non-Irish people, as well (usually in Australia, North America, and Ireland). Hence the phrase, "Everyone wants to be Irish on St. Patrick's Day." Celebrations are generally themed around the color green and all things Irish; both Christians and non-Christians celebrate the secular version of the holiday by wearing green or orange, eating Irish food and/or green foods, imbibing Irish drink (usually Guinness), and attending parades.
The St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin, Ireland is part of a five-day festival; over 500,000 people attended the 2006 parade. The largest St. Patrick's Day parade is held in New York City and it is watched by over 2 million spectators. The St. Patrick's Day parade was first held in Boston in 1737, organized by the Charitable Irish Society. New York's celebration began on 17 March 1762 when Irish soldiers in the British army marched through the city. The predominantly French-speaking Canadian city of Montréal, in the province of Québec is the oldest Saint Patrick's day parade in North America. The city's flag has the Irish emblem, the shamrock, in one of its corners. Ireland's cities all hold their own parades and festivals. These cities include Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Derry, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, and Waterford. Parades also take place in other Irish towns and villages.
Leprechauns kickoff weeklong festivities by renaming New London, Wisconsin to New Dublin
Other large parades include those in Savannah, Georgia , New London, Wisconsin (which changes its name to New Dublin the week of St. Patrick's Day) , Dallas, Cleveland, Manchester, Birmingham, London, Coatbridge, Montreal (the longest continually running St. Patrick's Day parade, celebrating its 183rd consecutive parade in 2007), Jackson, Mississippi, Boston, Houston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Rolla,Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Denver, St. Paul, Sacramento, San Francisco, Scranton, Seattle, Butte, Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, Syracuse, Newport, Holyoke and throughout much of the Western world. The parade held in Sydney, Australia is recorded as being the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.
As well as being a celebration of Irish culture, Saint Patrick's Day is a Christian festival celebrated in the Catholic Church, the Church of Ireland, and some other denominations. The day always falls in the season of Lent. Some bishops will grant an indult, or release, from the Friday no-meat observance when St. Patrick's Day falls on a Friday; this is sometimes colloquially known as a "corned-beef indult". When 17 March falls on a Sunday, church calendars (though rarely secular ones) move Saint Patrick's Day to the following Monday—and when the 17th falls during Holy Week (very rarely), the observance can be moved to the previous week or all the way to April, after Easter.
In many parts of North America, Britain, and Australia expatriate Irish, those of Irish descent, and ever-growing crowds of people with no Irish connections but who may proclaim themselves "Irish for a day" also celebrate St. Patrick's Day, usually by drinking larger amounts of alcoholic beverages (lager dyed green, Irish beer and stout, such as Murphys, Beamish, Smithwicks, Harp or Guinness, or Irish whiskey, Irish cider, Irish coffee, or Baileys Irish Cream) than they normally would, and by wearing green-coloured clothing. The eating of Irish soda bread (which is sold in supermarkets for the occasion, but not sold during the rest of the year except in specialty stores) is also common. Some recent American twists on the holiday, reflecting its growing popularity among the non-Irish, are the making and selling of green bagels and popcorn on and near the day. 2007 marked the first annual St. Patrick's Day parade and festival in the Scottish city of Glasgow. Despite Glasgow having a large Irish community, a parade was never thought feasible due to potential sectarian issues.
In the recent past, Saint Patrick's Day was celebrated only as a religious holiday. It became a public holiday in 1903, by the Bank Holiday (Ireland) Act 1903, an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament introduced by the Irish MP James O'Mara.[6] O'Mara later introduced the law which required that pubs be closed on 17 March, a provision which was repealed only in the 1970s. The first St. Patrick's Day parade held in the Irish Free State was held in Dublin in 1931 and was reviewed by the then Minister of Defence Desmond Fitzgerald. Although secular celebrations now exist, the holiday remains a religious observance in Ireland, for both the Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic Church.
It was only in the mid-1990s that the Irish government began a campaign to use Saint Patrick's Day to showcase Ireland and its culture. The government set up a group called St. Patrick's Festival, with the aim to:
—Offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebrations in the world and promote excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity.
—Provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent, (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations.
—Project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal, as we approach the new millennium.
The first Saint Patrick's Festival was held on 17 March, 1996. In 1997, it became a three-day event, and by 2000 it was a four-day event. By 2006, the festival was five days long.
The topic of the 2004 St. Patrick's Symposium was "Talking Irish," during which the nature of Irish identity, economic success, and the future were discussed. Since 1996, there has been a greater emphasis on celebrating and projecting a fluid and inclusive notion of "Irishness" rather than an identity based around traditional religious or ethnic allegiance. The week around Saint Patrick's Day usually involves Irish speakers using more Irish during seachtain na Gaeilge ("Irish Week").
Shamrock ("three-leaf clover")
Many Irish people still wear a bunch of shamrocks on their lapels or caps on this day or green, white, and orange badges (after the colours of the Irish flag). Girls and boys wear green in their hair. Artists draw shamrock designs on people's cheeks as a cultural sign, including American tourists.
Although Saint Patrick's Day has the colour green as its theme, one little known fact is that blue was once the colour associated with this day.
The biggest celebrations on the island of Ireland outside Dublin are in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, where Saint Patrick was buried following his death on 17 March, 461. In 2004, according to Down District Council, the week-long St. Patrick's Festival had over 2000 participants and 82 floats, bands, and performers, and was watched by over 30,000 people.
The day is celebrated by the Church of Ireland as a Christian festival. Saint Patrick's Day as a celebration of Irish culture was rarely acknowledged by Northern Irish loyalists, who consider it a festival of the Irish Republicans. The Belfast City Council recently agreed to give public funds to its parade for the first time; previously the parade was funded privately. The Belfast parade is based on equality and only the flag of St. Patrick is supposed to be used as a symbol of the day to prevent it being seen as a time which is exclusively for Republicans and Nationalists. This allowed both Unionists and Nationalists to celebrate the day together. The Unionists (orangemen) wear orange instead of green on St. Patrick's Day; both colours are in the Irish flag (although this the Irish flag is not an official flag in Northern Ireland, it being part of the United Kingdom), and orange often but not always represents the Protestants of Northern Ireland.
Since the 1990s, Irish Taoisigh have sometimes attended special functions either on Saint Patrick's Day or a day or two earlier, in the White House, where they present shamrock to the President of the United States. A similar presentation is made to the Speaker of the House. Originally only representatives of the Republic of Ireland attended, but since the mid-1990s all major Political parties in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are invited, with the attendance including the representatives of the Irish government, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Féin and others. No Northern Irish parties were invited for these functions in 2005. In recent years, it is common for the entire Irish government to be abroad representing the country in various parts of the world. In 2003, the President of Ireland celebrated the holiday in Sydney, the Taoiseach was in Washington, while other Irish government members attended ceremonies in New York City, Boston, San Francisco,Buffalo N.Y.,San Jose, Savannah, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Diego, New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, Korea, Japan, and Brazil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick
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