Pinch me...

Happy St. Paddy's Day, y'all!

All of the Irish hype is cause for reflection on my trip to Ireland last fall. Some of you may remember the blog my sister and I set up to document our trip - The Pink Shamrock. I was laughing to myself as I read through and remembered all of our adventures... and in turn posted this little ditty to KO's Facebook wall:


I'll be back with some of my favorite green finds later this morning but in the meantime, enjoy this snippet of Irish trivia:

Erin Go Bragh is the Anglicization of a Gaelic phrase used to express allegiance to Ireland. It is most often translated as "Ireland Forever", and pronounced /ˌɛrɪn gə ˈbrɔː/.

Saint Patrick's Day (Irish: Lá ’le Pádraig or Lá Fhéile Pádraig), colloquially St. Paddy's Day or Paddy's Day, is an annual feast day which celebrates Saint Patrick (circa AD 385–461), one of the patron saints of Ireland, and is generally celebrated on March 17.

The day is the national holiday of Ireland. It is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland and a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland and Montserrat. In Canada, Great Britain, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand, it is widely celebrated but is not an official holiday.

St. Patrick's Blue, not green, was the colour long-associated with St. Patrick. Green, the colour most widely associated with Ireland, with Irish people, and with St. Patrick's Day in modern times, may have gained its prominence through the phrase "the wearing of the green" meaning to wear a shamrock on one's clothing. At many times in Irish history, to do so was seen as a sign of Irish nationalism or loyalty to the Roman Catholic faith. St. Patrick used the shamrock, a three-leaved plant, to explain the Holy Trinity to the pre-Christian Irish. The wearing of and display of shamrocks and shamrock-inspired designs have become a ubiquitous feature of the saint's holiday.The change to Ireland's association with green rather than blue probably began around the 1750's.