Mois : mars 2024

Every year on February 14, couples from all over the world prove their love through gift exchanges and little touches.
Romantic cards to fill with a romantic message, heart-shaped chocolates, bouquets of red roses…: so many symbols that we all know, and that are sure to resurface every year in our stores and on our screens as we approach this iconic Valentine’s Day.
The origins of this celebration are however more mysterious.
The oldest celebration of Valentine’s day dates back from an annual pagan celebration known as Lupercalia, or the Lupercales. This festival, held on February 15, was intended during ancient Rome to celebrate fertility. The men undressed, sacrificed a sheep or a dog, and covered themselves with the skin of the animal sacrificed in order to increase, they thought, their fertility before meeting young girls.
It was at the end of the 5th century that Pope Gelase I put an end to the famous Lupercales. Shortly afterwards, the Catholic Church made 14 February a feast day to pay homage to the martyr Valentine.
Whether you celebrate Valentine’s Day or not, this holiday stems primarily from our ability to love, an ability that has connected humans for many centuries. Although it no longer consists in making us wear the skins of sacrificed animals as in the time of the Roman Empire, the festival still exists, and everyone likes to please the people who are dear to them.

Saint Patrick’s Day, celebrated on March 17, is a Christian holiday that celebrates Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

Saint Patrick was an evangelizer of Ireland. The legend tells that he would have driven all the snakes out of the country, symbolizing the conversion of the Irish people.

The festival is already celebrated by the Irish since the 9th and 10th centuries. It became a legal holiday in the Irish calendar on March 16, 1607. Saint Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in Ireland.

Saint Patrick’s Day is progressively become a civil holiday, symbol of recognition for all Irish people. It is in the United States, in Boston, that the first celebration of this holiday took place in 1737. The first official parade took place in New York in 1762. In Ireland, the first Saint Patrick’s Day parade took place in Dublin in 1931.

In the 1990s, the Irish government began a campaign to associate Saint Patrick’s Day with a festival to promote Irish culture. The government forms a group called the Saint Patrick Festival, which has the aim of :

• offer a national festival that ranks among the largest celebrations in the world
• to create energy and excitement across Ireland through innovation, creativity, investment and commercial activity
• provide an opportunity and motivation for people of Irish origin to assist and join in imaginative and expressive celebrations
• to project, internationally, a fair image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country.

The first Saint Patrick Festival took place on March 17, 1996. The festival stretches on 5 days. The event progressively became more secular. Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated not only by the Irish, but also by cities all over the world, including Buenos Aires (Argentina), New York (USA) and Montreal (Canada). The festival is characterized by the color green and symbols of Irish culture. During this celebration you must wear green clothes, assist at parades and festivals, and consume Irish food and drink.

N.N