St. Patrick’s Day
This Catholic feast day transformed into a secular American holiday honoring the Irish diaspora in the United States.
This Catholic feast day transformed into a secular American holiday honoring the Irish diaspora in the United States.
Nathaniel Glanzman
Reviewer URLNames: St. Patrick’s Day, Feast of Saint Patrick
This Catholic feast day transformed into a secular American holiday honoring the Irish diaspora in the United States.
Origin
Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. His legend is part of the fabric of Irish culture, including the culture of its diaspora in the United States.
The legend of St. Patrick says Patrick, 16, was enslaved and brought to Ireland from Britain. He escaped after six years of captivity, but after receiving a revelation from an angel in a dream, he returned to Ireland to minister Christians already in Ireland and to spread the word about Christianity.
St. Patrick’s Day has long been celebrated in Ireland as a Roman Catholic feast day. As with other Catholic feast days, these celebrations mainly centered around the church.
Later, St. Patrick’s Day grew into a secular holiday in the United States. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade was held in a Spanish colony now known as St. Augustine, Florida in 1601. In the British-controlled United States, members of the military in New York held a St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1766. And parades were first held in Boston and Savannah, Georgia in 1775 and 1824, respectively. In the 1840s, as Irish immigrants came to the U.S. seeking respite from the Great Hunger (also known as the Potato Famine), St. Patrick’s Day grew even larger. St. Patrick’s Day parades took on a greater significance, showing the ascendant political power of the Irish who now called the United States home.
St. Patrick’s Day, as Americans know it, is now celebrated around the world. Montreal, Canada, Auckland, New Zealand and Oslo, Norway all now host St. Patrick’s Day parades.
Traditions
Depending on where you live and your relationship to the Irish American diaspora, there are several different traditions for St. Patrick’s Day. The largest tradition is wearing green. There are several reasons for this, including to represent Irish republicanism or to hide from the trickster leprechauns, who allegedly cannot see those in green.
In the United States, corned beef and cabbage is a traditional St. Patrick's Day meal. This is not a traditional Irish meal, and there are several theories as to how it became associated with Irish Americans. Some posit it is an aspect of the cultural melting pot of America, with Irish Americans adopting the corned beef of their Jewish neighbors. Others say corned beef and cabbage is a tradition created whole-cloth by Irish Americans in search of an Irish culinary identity. Ireland’s history is marked by famine and displacement, which may have led Irish Americans to reject the potato (a crop forced on them by the British) as a national culinary marker.
Parades are a key feature of St. Patrick’s Day. Some of the largest in the United States take place in New York and Chicago. The Chicago River is dyed green each year in honor of the holiday.
St. Patrick’s Day is also known as a bar-hopping holiday in the United States. Cities across the globe hold pub crawls in honor of March 17th. This tradition has both religious roots and a more modern marketing aspect. St. Patrick’s Day was considered a “break” from the 40-day fasting period of Lent, allowing Catholics to indulge in foods and drinks from which they were otherwise abstaining. But, according to Time magazine, beer drinking on St. Patrick’s day really took off in the 1980s, thanks to a marketing push from Budweiser.
What to say
“Happy St. Patrick’s Day” is an appropriate greeting for anyone on this day.