We all learn about the leprechauns and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in grade school. There is one day in March where the class dresses in all green clothing and if you had a cool class, you would have a party. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky enough to forget to wear green, you would even get pinched.
St. Patrick’s Day, the day of full green, gold chocolates, shamrocks, short people, and gingers. We recognize this holiday of celebrating St. Patrick the Catholic saint but also the Irish and their traditions for the holiday. St. Patrick’s Day is full of different traditions. However, all of these traditions that happen as a child end up dying out after you hit a certain age.
As people get older, the way they celebrate St. Patrick’s Day starts to change. In elementary school, it’s mostly about wearing green and having small classroom parties. But once you get older, those kinds of traditions start to disappear. You don’t really see people getting pinched for not wearing green anymore, and the holiday is not centered around school activities. Instead, different traditions start to take their place. Some people go to parades in big cities, while others spend the day hanging out with friends or going out to eat. The celebration becomes less about small school traditions and more about community events and spending time with people. Everyone starts new traditions but do we, as society, keep the traditions the Irish brought to our land? Even though some traditions fade as people grow up, the significance of the holiday itself does not really go away. St. Patrick’s Day is a staple for celebrating the Irish in America. This is the beautiful thing about this day and all the holidays we celebrate in America.
In Ireland, they celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with parades and festivals, wearing green, having traditional music and dances, religious observances, and festive meals. The parades spread to every city in Ireland. In Dublin, there are 500,000 people who come to see their parade. The parades contain floats, dancers, and community groups. The festivals have puppet shows and street performances. The people honor Ireland’s landscape and celebrate with pride for their country. They also wear things that have shamrocks, because of St. Patrick’s use of shamrocks to teach about the Trinity. The Irish people also go to Mass for this holiday.
In America, we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day very similarly to how they do it in the motherland. We have parades, green clothing, music, dancing, and cultural events. This is more than just a holiday for the Irish though; it celebrates their ancestry and fills their communities with pride. This is a day of publicly celebrating their Irish identity after years of facing discrimination. Celebration wise, the traditions from the motherland have been kept very well. For some cities, there are city decorations, like in Chicago, where they turn the river green.
St. Patrick’s Day will always be a day to remember no matter how you celebrate it. Some might remember getting pinched for not wearing green; others might remember it for the partying they went to. The special sparks of St. Patrick’s Day has not died out, but grown.
