Just to show St. Patrick's Day isn't just about getting slammed here's a quick history lesson about the holiday. And for the reading impaired we have a video.
From Wikipedia:
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.
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.
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