St. Patrick’s Day – a day dedicated to pinching friends and strangers if they don’t wear the color green, as well as a day dedicated to bringing together people of all shapes and sizes under one shared love: consumption.

It’s a day of green beer, Bailey’s, and Irish car-bombs. It’s a day of wearing four-leaf clovers because that’s the only Irish thing you know besides Lucky Charms. It’s a day of being day drunk because we, as a nation, need, no, deserve a holiday to drink excessively from sunrise to sunset. It is St. Patrick’s Day, and what a lovely day it is.

It’s not every day you can forgo all of your responsibilities, to go out to the bar and spend your grocery money on shots with strangers. Sure, you don’t have anything going on Sunday, but if you drink all day on something that isn’t a “nationally recognized holiday,” then you’ll be labeled as an alcoholic.

You’re an adult, you do adult things. Sundays are dedicated to your adult life, like going to the gym or doing taxes. St. Patrick’s Day is a day for you to forget your woes, it’s a day for you to forget what tomorrow is, it’s a day for you do nothing but consume. It’s the Thanksgiving of drinking.

St. Patrick’s Day is a day to give thanks to your friends two blocks away that you sometimes party with, it’s a day to give thanks to malts, to yeasts, to the big corporations that make it possible for you to spend a day being completely unproductive with your friends, who you’re pretty sure took your copy of “Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” for the Nintendo 64.

It’s a day that only comes once a year, a day that lets us be adults and drink all day because we, as adults, need a holiday to tell us that it’s OK to drink all day.

Legend states that those who decide not to drink on St. Patrick’s Day are doomed to forever walk this Earth as a friendless scrub. If you don’t want to be cursed for the rest of your days, then maybe you should go to the bar and drink — that green Bud Lite is not going to drink itself.

Why would you not want to go out on St. Patrick’s Day? What are you, a friendless scrub? There’s so much to offer when you needlessly consume with a group of people you only barely know. What if you have things to do? This is America. What in the world could be more important than celebrating a holiday dedicated to a drug?

I’ll tell you what you need to do – you need to go to the local liquor store and grab a can of Guinness and shotgun it on the spot. If you missed out on St. Patrick’s Day, you need to do your Irish ancestors right by celebrating the way you think they would.

Even after St. Patrick’s Day ends, it doesn’t mean that you can’t still carry the values that you learned throughout the day, like wearing the color green and beer-bonging through a green tube instead of the normal tube. But just remember, this day comes once a year, you can only drink all day once a year, no matter the occasion.