14). Special Event - St. Patrick’s Day

     It was Saturday On March 16^th, 2009 while Chicago river turned green from 9am and kept green for 5 hours. Also, a lot of citizens wear green clothes, green hats or green necklaces on that day. They were celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.  

St. Patrick’s Day is on March 17^th, the death of saint patrick, Ireland's most celebrated patron saint.  It is to specifically commemorate Saint Patrick and the subsequent arrival of Christianity in Ireland. It was mostly celebrated in Ireland and became popular in The United States because of the immigration. Many cities celebrated St. Patrick’s Day differently in The United States. 

The first-time celebrating was in New York, in 1762. Today, people celebrate it as much as the Irish culture.
In st. Patrick’s day, people wear in green clothes and shamrocks. Some people eat traditional Irish meat of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and soda bread. People in Ireland go to church in the morning. Chicago has dyed Chicago river into green to celebrate it for over 50 years. Also, Chicago has parade on st. Patrick’s Day.

I was so interested with the river dyeing, so I wore a green coat and went to Chicago downtown to watch the green river with my classmate, Yongyi. We meet in Chinatown in the morning and took the train to state street. We saw that there were a lot of people in green dress on the road. They walked by groups, and they met friends on the road randomly. We walked through Columbus street and arrived at the Millennium Park. There were a lot of people and policemen there. We could not go to the park because it was forbidden. We just followed the parades, and then we arrived to the riverwalk. 

The river was so green that caught my eyes at once. In addition, there was so crowded and hardly to move. Everyone there was excitedly talking photos. So did we. On the other hand, I was worried about losing my phone into the water when I took photos standing on the bridge. Moreover, lights in the city all turned green. Overall, I had a great day.

I had researched some websites about the st. Patrick’s Day before I went to sleep at that day. Saint patrick was a 5th-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland, and he was known as the "Apostle of Ireland". He had a very hard childhood, and he helped a lot of people before he had gone in Ireland. Also, the was a “two Patricks” theory, which was proposed by T. F. O'Rahilly. However, St Patrick’s Day celebrated Ireland as a religious and cultural holiday for so many years. In the dioceses of Ireland, it is both a solemnity and a holy day of obligation, and also a celebration of Ireland itself. 

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