Saint David's day (Welsh: Dydd Gŵyl Dewi) is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on the 1st of March each year. The first day of March was chosen in remembrance of the death of Saint David. Tradition holds that he died on that day in 589. The date was declared a national day of celebration within Wales in the 18th century.
Cross-party support resulted in the National Assembly for Wales voting unanimously to make St. David's Day a public holiday in 2000. A poll conducted for Saint David's Day in 2006 found that 87% of people in Wales wanted it to be a bank holiday, with 65% prepared to sacrifice a different bank holiday to ensure this. A petition in 2007 to make St. David's Day a bank holiday was rejected by the office of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Read more about Saint David's Day: The Significance of St. David's Day, Traditions
Famous quotes containing the words saint, david and/or day:
“The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)
“I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our fear that Communism might some day take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.”
—Anonymous U.S. Analyst In 1967. Quoted in “The Uses of Anticommunism,” vol. 21, published in The Socialist Register (1985)