St. Valentines Day is known around the world as a day for lovers.  We buy valentine gifts, write love poems, and generally express our affection for our significant others.  When you look at the greeting card aisle, with all the innocuous pink hearts and red paper, and you see the chocolate candies and red roses, it is difficult to imagine that this holiday has its roots in a bloody festival and a violent murder.  However that is indeed the case of St. Valentine Day. 

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St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th, is an Irish holiday celebrating St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.  St. Patrick was born Maewyn Succat of an Italian father and a Scottish mother, sometime around 385 A.D., in Scotland.  At the age of 16 he was kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery for six years in Ireland.  After seeing a vision of a ship, St. Patrick planned his escape from Ireland to France, where he became a priest and later a bishop.

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As the calendars have changed over the millennia, so has the day on which people celebrate New Years Day.  However, the history of the New Years Day is almost as old as the human conception of time itself.  From the advent of the first calendars in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, New Years Day has been a time for friends, family and celebrations. 

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Like much of the culture of Louisiana, the modern celebration of Mardi Gras and its manifestation in parties and parades around the United States, particularly in New Orleans, are a direct result of French influence.  However, the origins of Mardi Gras go back much further than the French celebration of the beginning of the Lenten Season. 

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Although weddings and wedding celebrations occur in some form or fashion all over the world and have since people began organizing themselves into societies, most of the history and traditions associated with modern marriages are actually fairly recent.  Unlike holidays like New Years, which has been celebrated for at least 4,000 years, wedding day traditions like the white dress are not quite so old.

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Each year on October 31st people from all over celebrate Halloween.  A favorite of children and those who like to tap into their “inner child”, Halloween is a day to dress up in costume, hand out candy (usually to children), and try to frighten each other and ourselves with spooky stories.  Like many holidays that are celebrated today, Halloween did not start off being celebrated in this manner – its origins have a history that started many centuries ago.

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There are very few people in the world today who do not know what the Christmas holiday is all about.  Christmas, as we know it today, is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, which happened over 2000 years ago.  The word “Christmas” translates to “Mass Of Christ”.   However, we can all be sure that the celebration of the Christmas holiday did not start right away.  So how did the actual celebration of the Christmas holiday begin? 

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