By Chris Cosci

It's St. Patrick's Day - another holiday that gleefully forgets its origins and concentrates solely on such festive and heartwarming traditions as drinking beer, drinking ale, and drinking more beer.

Like many holidays, the origin of St. Patrick's Day lies heavily in religion (the "Saint" part is a dead giveaway). For those who do not know, St. Patrick was primarily known for helping to convert the Pagan population of Ireland to Christianity, baptizing them, and setting up churches and monasteries. His dedication earned him great prominence in Christian history. For centuries, the Irish celebrated this sacred history with reverence and significance. And that's when America stepped in.

Americans tend to be experts at making up stories that were never really part of the holiday's history. In fact, I'm willing to bet that many people read the previous paragraph and wondered how St. Patrick had time to drive all the snakes out of Ireland while he was converting the Pagans. The truth is, he didn't need time. There were no snakes to begin with. But obviously the snake story is much cooler than all that Pagan stuff.

And if we don't make up our own tales, we can borrow myths from other people and make them even more invalid. Take shamrocks. The supposed history behind them is that St. Patrick used these three-leaf clovers to represent the Holy Trinity when teaching Christianity. There is no factual basis for the story, but we couldn't just stop at promoting this unfounded myth. We eliminated any religious connotations by adding a fourth leaf to the shamrock. And then we said that it was simply a good luck charm.

It seems as though we have gone through a lot of trouble to cover up the religious foundations of this holiday. This isn't even one of the major holidays. But with a little effort, we could easily make it one. We just need to create a media blitz and tell children the story of Liam the St. Patrick's Day Leprechaun, who travels all over the world delivering chocolate snakes and soda bread to all the good little boys and girls.

And speaking of leprechauns, they are yet another glamorized icon of this misunderstood holiday. In traditional folklore, leprechauns are not the amusing, happy-go-lucky figures we are used to seeing. Instead, they are rather unfriendly and tend to keep to themselves. A more accurate depiction of these creatures can be found in the cult-classic "Leprechaun" series of horror movies. While these films' creators probably took some creative liberties in portraying the leprechaun as a wicked creature that terrorizes and kills people, its generally unpleasant attitude is probably more fitting with the creature's legend than its charming, cereal-pushing counterpart.

Still, it is impressive how popular the day has become. And although the holiday is primarily associated with the Irish, it seems like everybody gets into the spirit. In fact, wearing green has practically become a requirement for the day, regardless of whether you are Irish, you know someone who is Irish, or you ever even heard the word "Irish."

As for the seemingly unrelated traditions, it is hard to say how they all started. But I think it would be safe to assume that there was some beer involved.