Random Thursday

St. Patrick's Day is almost near! Not that it's a BIG holiday or anything, but being partly Irish I have fun wearing green! Which is pretty much all I do! No parades, no over the top drinking, basically nothing. Yeah, I'm not the most fun or party animal. Just simply me.

So here are some fun facts about St. Patick's Day that I found at NationalGeographic.com, borrowing the ones I found most interesting:

• For starters, the real St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was born in Britain around A.D. 390 to an aristocratic Christian family with a townhouse, a country villa, and plenty of slaves.
• What's more, Patrick professed no interest in Christianity as a young boy, Freeman noted.
• At 16, Patrick's world turned: He was kidnapped and sent overseas to tend sheep as a slave in the chilly, mountainous countryside of Ireland for seven years.
• According to St. Patrick's Day lore, Patrick used the three leaves of a shamrock to explain the Christian holy trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• Another St. Patrick myth is the claim that he banished snakes from Ireland. It's true no snakes exist on the island today, Luther College's Freeman said—but they never did.
• Ireland, after all, is surrounded by icy waters—much too cold to allow snakes to migrate from Britain or anywhere else.
• Since snakes often represent evil in literature, "when Patrick drives the snakes out of Ireland, it is symbolically saying he drove the old, evil, pagan ways out of Ireland [and] brought in a new age," Freeman said.
• In 1962 the show of solidarity took a spectacular turn in Chicago when the city decided to dye a portion of the Chicago River green.
• On any given day 5.5 million pints of Guinness, the famous Irish stout brand, are consumed around the world.
• But on St. Patrick's Day, that number more than doubles to 13 million pints, said Beth Davies Ryan, global corporate-relations director of Guinness.