Monday, March 17, 2008

Green with Envy

Happy Birthday, Mom! Once on my Mom's birthday, her best friend made and brought us dinner. It was green scalloped potatoes and ham, green jello and green milk! Well, it was memorable.

My Mom shares her birthday on the day they celebrate Saint Patrick. Saint Patrick was a Roman Britain-born Christian missionary and is the patron saint of Ireland along with Brigid of Kildare and Columba. When he was about sixteen he was captured by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family. He entered the church, as his father and grandfather had before him, becoming a deacon and a bishop. He later returned to Ireland as a missionary in the north and west of the island, but little is known about the places where he worked and no link can be made between Patrick and any church. By the eighth century he had become the patron saint of Ireland. The Irish monastery system evolved after the time of Patrick and the Irish church did not develop the diocesan model that Patrick and the other early missionaries had tried to establish.

Why the shamrock? St. Patrick used the shamrock, a three-leaved plant, to explain the Holy Trinity to the pre-Christian Irish.
Source: Wikipedia

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