On the Nature of Things | Forum

Hans Bulvai wrote:Happy New Year y'all!

May it be good for you and humanity in general.

noddy wrote: good year to everyone, i do hope its a better one than the last.

Typhoon wrote:They get all the girls . . .

Hoosiernorm wrote:The one day of the year that everyone is Irish

Typhoon wrote:

Hoosiernorm wrote:The one day of the year that everyone is Irish

Indeed.

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He studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to Ireland.
He spent his last 30 years there, baptizing pagans, ordaining priests, and founding churches and monasteries. His persuasive powers must have been astounding: Ireland fully converted to Christianity within 200 years and was the only country in Europe to Christianize peacefully. Patrick's Christian conversion ended slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare in Ireland. (He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any. Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an 18th-century fabrication.)

The Irish have celebrated their patron saint with a quiet religious holiday for centuries, perhaps more than 1,000 years. It took the United States to turn St. Patrick's Day into a boozy spectacle. Irish immigrants first celebrated it in Boston in 1737 and first paraded in New York in 1762. By the late 19th century, the St. Patrick's Day parade had become a way for Irish-Americans to flaunt their numerical and political might. It retains this role today.