St. Patrick's Day traditions date back ages

The Irish and wannabe Irish around the world donned their green for another year of celebrating St. Patrick's Day Thursday.

The celebration itself was named after St. Patrick, the most commonly recognized of all the patron saints in Ireland. He was born in Roman Britain in the Fourth Century to a wealthy Romano-British family, and at the age of 16, was kidnapped by Irish raiders and held captive in Ireland as a slave. Later, he said God came to him in a dream and told him to escape to the coast where he would be able to board a ship and return to his home in Britain.

All of this he did, and upon returning, joined the Church in Auxerre and began studying to become a priest. In 432, he said God called him back to Ireland to convert the Irish to Christianity. After 30 years of working there, he died on March 17, 461, and was buried in Downpatrick. While there were many missionaries who were much more successful than Patrick, he is held in high esteem in the Irish church for his work there and is memorialized all over the island and is also known for having driven all the snakes out of Ireland.

One of the teaching methods that St. Patrick had used in winning the Irish over was a shamrock to explain the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Today, its association with St. Patrick's Day has grown into tradition along with that of wearing green. The tradition of pinching those who are not wearing green on St. Patrick's Day is an American one.

Some believe that it is because if you wear green you are invisible to leprechauns who love to play tricks, so not wearing it makes you visible to them, and therefore an open target to their teasing and pinching. Some say that it was a custom picked up from Irish settlers who told their children that if they did not behave, fairies would pinch them. Despite the fact that Americans do it as part of the Irish celebration, it holds no Irish roots and is not something that is done in Ireland.

The Catholic holiday did not become an official public holiday in Ireland until 1903. Later a law was introduced that required all pubs and bars to be closed on this day because drinking had gotten so out of hand. But in 1970, the law was repealed, and the pubs reopened in celebration. In the mid-1990s, the Irish government began a marketing campaign to use St. Patrick's Day as a showcase of Ireland and its culture.

The biggest celebrations there are held outside Dublin in Downpatrick, where a weeklong festival is held with a parade that has included up to 2,000 participants, 82 floats and more than 30,000 visitors. The shortest parade in the world takes park in Dripsey, Cork, where the annual parade is only 100 yards long and runs between the village's two pubs.

Here in the United States, many cities celebrate with pub crawls, parades and festivals. Seattle and other cities paint the traffic stripe of their parade routes green. Chicago dyes its river green and many places color their fountains and pools as well in honor of the holiday. The event is one of the leading days for drinking alcohol in the United States and is typically one of the busiest days of the year for bars and restaurants.

But the true Irish typically celebrate by closing their businesses for the day, going to church services and spending the day with their family -- a far cry different than the green beer, beaded necklaces, green-dyed hair and leprechaun costumes that you see here in the states.