Best Places to Celebrate St. Patrick's Day 2008 in St. Louis, Missouri

I'd rather refer to St. Patrick's Day as Celtic Day. After all why should the Irish have the big national holiday? What about the Welsh and us Scotsmen? And even, ye gads, what about the English? St. Patrick was the saint that brought Christianity to Ireland. Not everyone thought that was necessarily a good thing, especially the Druids. When you hear that he drove the snakes out of Ireland, the "snakes" that they are referring to were actually the pagan Druids.

Today the day is celebrated by the Church of Ireland as a Christian festival. Originally there was a split between the Northern Irish Loyalists and the Irish Republicans and the holiday wasn't celebrated up north. The Belfast City Council just recently agreed to give public funding for the Belfast parade. The Unionists, or Orangemen, celebrate the holiday by wearing orange instead of green and originally blue was the color used. (www.wikipedia.com)

St. Patrick's day is a religious holiday, but like many others, it has also become a secular one. The "wearing of the green" not only represents the color of the Emerald Isle, but I think it also reflects the hope that spring will be just around the corner and the color green will predominate. It is a time for shedding off the doldrums of the winter and look forward to the coming spring. It has also become a huge holiday here in the United States and particularly here in the city of St. Louis as we have a large Irish population. So large in fact we have two St. Patrick Day parades, one downtown and another in the predominately Irish neighborhood of Dogtown.

So where's the best place to celebrate the holiday? Here are a few of my favorites: