St David’s Day greetings and messages: How to celebrate St David’s Day
ST DAVID'S DAY has arrived and the daffodils are in bloom. So how do you say Happy St David's Day in Welsh?
St. David’s Day: Mark Kent explains the Welsh celebration
St David’s Day falls on March 1 every year, a day when Welsh folk around the world will honour the Patron Saint of Wales, St David. The hero, who is credited as defeating the Saxons in battle, is thought to have died on March 1, either in 601AD or 589AD.
How to celebrate St David’s Day
With spring in the air, why not pop to the shops and pick up a bunch of daffodils.
Or maybe sample some of Wales’ finest cuisine – Welsh rarebit, leek soup, tintern cheese, Welsh cakes or crempog (Welsh pancakes with salt and vinegar).
Try a nice sing-song along to Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.
Or maybe you’d like to send your friends and family a nice message by saying Happy St David’s Day in Welsh.
How to say Happy St David’s Day in Welsh
To celebrate today’s festivities, you can say Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus, or Happy Saint David's Day.
How do you pronounce that you may ask?
It’s: deethe goo-eel Dewi happiss
Other St David’s Day greetings or poems
Former Welsh National Poet Gillian Clarke’s poem ‘Miracle On St David’s Day’:
An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed
with daffodils. The sun treads the path
among cedars and enormous oaks.
It might be a country house, guests strolling,
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.
I am reading poetry to the insane.
An old woman, interrupting, offers
as many buckets of coal as I need.
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic
on a good day, they tell me later.
In a cage of first March sun a woman
sits not listening, not feeling.
In her neat clothes the woman is absent.
A big, mild man is tenderly led
to his chair. He has never spoken.
His labourer’s hands on his knees, he rocks
gently to the rhythms of the poems.
I read to their presences, absences,
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.
He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’.
The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect.
Outside the daffodils are still as wax,
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables
unspoken, their creams and yellows still.
Forty years ago, in a Valleys school,
the class recited poetry by rote.
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.
When he’s done, before the applause, we observe
the flowers’ silence. A thrush sings
and the daffodils are flame.