The holiday St. Patrick’s Day was originally made to celebrate the death of St. Patrick himself. The Irish celebrated by showing their culture with parades, dancing, drinking, and walking around with a whole lot of green on. Watching the parade you can expect to see over 200 marching units, floats, and floats making their way through downtown. On St. Patrick’s Day, you can expect to see people doing the Irish Jig and different types of traditional set dances.

Most believe that St. Patrick’s Day is considered a day of obligation and high spirits. Those celebration try to show how much they truly love to be who they truly are. Throughout the day there will be Irish dancers and musicians scurrying through the streets of parages celebrating with the ones around them. Everyone keeps their positivity high because it’s supposed to be considered your lucky day.

Throughout the whole day between snacks and sweet treats there is a bunch of traditional foods that people use as their feast. While mainly people look for foods that are more green rather than any other color to fit in even more for the holiday itself, a few meals they have on St. Patrick’s day are corned beef and cabbage and shepherd’s pie. Some of the sweet treats they have on this holiday are cupcakes, brownies, a pot of gold cake, Irish potatoes, and Irish cream chocolate tart.

Although these may be some of the most popular ,they are most certainly not what are truly had on St. Patrick’s Day. I know that may sound crazy, but for the meals they have in Ireland, they range from different types of lamb stew and colcannon. You may be thinking right now, what in the world is colcannon–it’s smashed potatoes with cabbage folded through. While pastries on the other hand always have chocolate butter pastry pies.

Today we got together with a few students and teachers to find out what their opinions are on the holiday, while also trying to see how many people are still celebrating this holiday. From getting together with students in Gateway, it seems as though they don’t celebrate it as much as they used to. Everyone had agreed to celebrating it at some point but then overtime stopped.

Senior Em Andrews echoed the majority, “To me personally, it’s just another day, I feel like I don’t see people celebrating it as much. When I was a kid we used to celebrate the holiday. Although, as I got older I stopped celebrating it at all.”

When asked if there were any traditions you had learned from celebrating the holiday, she said, “No, we honestly just did what everyone else would do on St. Patrick’s Day, besides that, we didn’t do anything special that I would consider traditional.”

Interestingly enough, most of the students whom I had asked responded with the same thing and were not Irish so didn’t celebrate it at all.

After having what seemed to be no luck with people who had celebrated the holiday, we were able to get together with one of our staff members, Mrs. Hayes. She had felt so honored and happy to be able to talk about the things she loves about St. Patrick’s Day.

Mrs. Hayes said, “Yes, I have Irish in me. My husband and I have been celebrating it for a long time and even had our kids learn our traditions we had learned over the years.”

She also learned a lot about the history of the holiday, “I’ve learned that St. Patrick himself scared the snakes away from Ireland. Although, I would like to add that I don’t believe in Leprechauns and the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Even though I don’t believe in those, I do believe in good luck rainbows.”

And lastly, we asked Mrs. Hayes, “Do you believe St. Patrick’s Day is an important holiday to celebrate? Why or why not?” She then responded: 

Talking with Mrs. Hayes was an absolute pleasure, and she was able to give us great insight into reasons for celebrating the holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. If you haven’t celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in quite some time, think about starting up again! It’s a holiday fun for all ages.