St. Patrick's Day: Bet You Didn't Know | History

Millions of people around the world donned their best green attire every March 17th to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. But there is a lot we bet you didn't know about Ireland's patron saint. To start with, St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was born around the 5th century in Britain, then part of the Roman Empire. At 16, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and spent six years in captivity. He converted to Christianity and later returned to Ireland to spend the rest of his life working as a Christian missionary. After Patrick died on March 17th, 461, he was largely forgotten until mythology and legend grew and centuries later, he was honoured as the patron saint of Ireland. According to one famous myth, Patrick drove all the snakes from Ireland. The story symbolised Patrick cleansing the island of paganism. There's just one problem. Ireland never had any snakes to begin with. The Emerald Isle is surrounded by water too frigid for snakes to migrate there, whether from Britain or anywhere else. According to another famous story, Patrick used the three leaves of the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity. As a result, people in 18th century Ireland started wearing shamrocks on March 17th to signify their Irish Christian pride. That tradition later grew into wearing green clothing, a popular St. Patrick's Day custom today. Though shamrocks don't really exist, we know them as any one of several three leaf plants, such as wood sorrel or white and yellow clover. As important as St. Patrick is to Irish history, we bet you didn't know the tradition of celebrating March 17th with parades actually started in America. The parade tradition really took off after the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland in the 1840s, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants pouring into New York, Boston and other American cities. The first record of a St. Patrick's Day parade in New York dates to 1762, when a group of Irish soldiers serving with the British marched a few blocks to a tavern in lower Manhattan. Today, it's the largest and longest St. Patrick's Day parade, boasting close to 200,000 participants and nearly 3 million spectators each year. So this March 17th, we hope you'll be wearing green and toasting to some St. Patrick's Day history that we bet you didn't know.