They say everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, but some people who don't know the story of St. Patrick probably wonder why this Irish Catholic saint became the basis for a national holiday. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, and the practice of celebrating him came over with the many Irish immigrants that flocked to the US and the soldiers from the British army that stayed in the US after battles. The earliest celebrations of St. Patrick's Day in the US were in the 18th century, although back then it was celebrated strictly as a religious holiday. It became a public holiday just after 1900. St. Patricks Day is on March 17th, and on that day people of all nationalities and religions wear something green, drink a lot of Irish beer, cover themselves in shamrocks, and eat a lot of hearty Irish food. Some even dress like leprechauns. Some cities like Chicago even dye their rivers green and paint the sidewalks green just for St. Patrick's Day. But where did these St. Patrick's Day traditions come from?

Eating Irish food like Ham and Cabbage and drinking Irish beer is more of a celebration of Ireland than a celebration of St. Patrick. Over the years Ireland adopted the celebration of St. Patrick's Day as a day of celebrating the national heritage of Ireland but originally the 17th of March was strictly a religious holiday that commemorated the death of St. Patrick. St. Patrick was one of the first Christian missionaries. He went to Ireland from England to convert the Irish, who still followed a Pagan religion, to Christianity.  St. Patrick is famous for driving all the snakes out of Ireland, but that is commonly believed to be a metaphor for driving Paganism out of Ireland since the snake is a powerful symbol in the Irish Pagan religion.
The shamrock, a plant with three distinct leaves, is sacred to St. Patrick and is used to represent him and to represent Ireland. Legend says that St. Patrick, a missionary to Ireland, used the shamrock to explain the idea of the Catholic Holy Trinity to the people who lived in Ireland. The concept of three people being one person was difficult for the general populace, many of whom were uneducated, to understand so the shamrock , as a plant with three leaves that was on plant, was the perfect way to demonstrate the Trinity concept to the local people.

St. Patrick became the inspiration for hundreds of thousands of missionaries who would go on to evangelize Christianity all over the world. His success in converting the Irish people to Christianity from Paganism convinced others that people all over the world could be converted to Christianity if only Christians would go bring them the word of God. What St. Patrick did that made him so successful was to incorporate the myths and legends that the people were already familiar with into Christian stories so that the people had no trouble accepting them as truth.  St. Patrick's Day will continue to be a day to celebrate all things Irish but the basis of St. Patrick's Day is the story of an English monk who managed to convert nearly an entire nation to Christianity.