Booked Days: St. Patrick's Day

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

In honor of this highly respected and well-known holiday, I will write in this blog in green instead of black. 

Just kidding. I mean, not about the green font part. I'm still going to type the whole thing in green which I find REALLY annoying. I hate reading stuff in different colored fonts, but I don't want any of you guys pinching my blog. If that's possible.

The real reason why I'm writing a blog post about this particular day is because I felt like I cheated you readers (anyone out there?) with my short book blog about Fire by Kristin Cashore. But I was going nuts and that's how it came out. Plus, today is a "holiday". Has anyone out there ever wondered why St. Patrick's Day is celebrated? It's been an annual tradition my whole life, and I just went along with it, never questioning the reason why I had to wear a color that I looked absolutely HORRIBLE in just to stop people from grabbing at me with their fingers. When I actually sat down to think about it (well, alright. I didn't sit down to think about it. I was standing at the time), here's what I came up with.

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There's this guy called Saint Patrick. He's from Ireland. And he lived on a clover patch. Everyday, since Patrick didn't have any friends, he sat in the clover patch counting how many leaves the clovers had. He sat in that clover patch for such a long time that his skin and clothes turned permanently green. But Patrick was okay with that because then no one would bother him in his clover patch. 

Now, of course Patrick had a family. His dad happened to be some rich guy in Ireland and, seeing that his son was green, pulled some strings and proclaimed that Patrick's birthday (March 17) would be St. Patrick's Day. On this day, everyone had to wear something green, like his son, so that Patrick wouldn't feel so lonely being green. But people didn't care about this new holiday and refused to wear green. Patrick's father became angry and began thinking of a way to punish them. He wasn't a very strong man and didn't want to confront a man (or woman) in a fist fight. Which is why he decided to pinch people. Thus the holiday.

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Or so I thought! St. Patrick's Day is actually a religious holiday. Patrick was born in Roman Britain, not even Ireland! But he was kidnapped by the Irish and made into a slave. He eventually escaped captivity, but went back to Ireland as a bishop. The shamrock was used Christian doctrine of the Trinity to the Irish people. And I was wrong about his father being some wealthy Irish man; his father was a deacon.

But get this; the original color associated with Saint Patrick was blue. BLUE! I look perfectly good in blue. But for some reason or another, they decided to change it to green, probably because of the shamrock. Oh well.

Here's something that I found really interesting when I was researching the real history of St. Patrick's Day.

This is a picture of the Chicago River dyed green. I found this absolutely hilarious! A whole river dyed green....wow. I wonder if they still do that. You'd think that it would cause some kind of problem, like it would pollute the water or dye the sides of the river green.