St. Patrick's Day...where did it come from?

St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner again (Saturday), and I wanted to be reminded again of why there is a holiday for this guy. Last year I posted about St. Patrick mainly through this post from Stand to Reason's blog. It is a very insightful post, and here are a few paragraphs summing up this man's life:

"Sometime around 400 AD, Patrick, a sixteen-year-old Briton, was kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold into slavery in Ireland. He had previously rejected the Christian faith of his parents, but during his six years of captivity, he repented and gave his heart to God, praying constantly as he tended sheep alone in the hills. When he escaped and returned to Britain, Patrick was far behind his peers in terms of education and never really caught up, but he worked hard to receive the theological training he needed so he could return to the Irish as a missionary--to the very people who had enslaved him"

"Thanks to Patrick's love and service, within a hundred years, the country was transformed from an illiterate, pagan nation of war, slavery, and human sacrifice to the guardian of the literature of Western civilization as Rome crumbled. After the dust settled, it was the Irish who traveled into Europe to plant the seeds of spiritual renewal and learning through the creation of monasteries that protected the ancient manuscripts and re-evangelized Europe."

"The irony of this holiday is that Patrick would be horrified to learn that not only is there a special day now devoted to him, but that day is cluttered with leprechauns, gold, and good-luck charms--the kind of paganism he worked so tirelessly to rescue people from in the first place."