Why do people wear red on St. Josephs day?
This has to be the single most frequent question I receive, and unfortunately I have no good answer for it. For some the custom is to wear red, others have told me they wear orange and the custom where I grew up was to wear purple. The closest I could find was that purple and red have something to do with the color of vestments worn during lent. I don’t know if this is any corallary, but it’s the only thing I could come up with. As for the purple, the school colors for St. Joseph’s School were purple and white, so that could be why we wore purple. Someday I hope to find a more definitive answer. In 2007 I received the following information in an email from a very nice woman who gave me permission to share it. Thank you! We do NOT wear “red” on St. Joseph’s Day…. we DO wear “purple”, i.e. the color reserved to royalty which represents the royal line of David passed to Jesus as the seed of Jesse. Cardinals of our Roman Catholic Church also wear the purple; and it is traditional in port