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Crazy Facts About St. Patricks Day

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Crazy Facts About St. Patricks Day

The tradition of celebrating March 17th with parades actually started in America. st. Paddy’s might be more American than Irish. 34 million Americans claim Irish heritage which is about 5 times the population of Ireland itself. The parade tradition really took off after the great potato famine hit Ireland in the 1840s sending hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants pouring into New York. The first record of a st. Patrick’s Day parade in New York dates to 1762 when a group of Irish soldiers serving with the British marched a few blocks to a tavern in lower Manhattan. Today it’s the largest and longest st. Patrick’s Day parade boasting close to 200,000 participants and nearly 3 million spectators each year. Chicago celebrate st. Patrick’s Day by dumping green dye into the Chicago River and they’ve been doing that since 1962 and they dumped 40 tons of dye into the river. Since 2009 the White House Fountain is also dyed green.

St Patrick’s day is celebrated in many different countries but is an official holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, in the Canadian provinces of newfoundland and Labrador and in the C aribbean island of Montserrat. Montserrat is a really small Caribbean island that has a large Irish population which is why celebrating St patrick’s day is so important there they made it an official holiday. In the US, the Irish leader presents the US President a crystal bowl of shamrocks and the pair then pose for photos. Though the president can keep the crystal the shamrocks themselves are promptly destroyed as per security procedures.

Today beer is probably the second most synonymous thing with Saint Patrick’s Day. Behind Ireland itself on average between 11 and 13 million pints of Guinness are consumed worldwide on March 17th and a 2012 study found the day to be worth over 245 million dollars to the International brewing industry. However drinking is not a St Paddys day tradition and in fact pubs weren’t even allowed to be open in Ireland on that day. Lent the holiday originally began as a day of feast when the Christians put their Lent restrictions aside to honor the death of the patron Saint Patrick. On this day the people of Ireland would indulge in as much food and beverages as possible. More often than not were non-alcoholic. Iinterestingly enough pubs were closed on the holiday for a majority of the 20th century because drinking during church observed holidays was looked down on. This continued until the 70s when beer companies began to target the holiday with advertising causing the beer tradition to come to fruition.

Celebrating St. Patricks day with Flippysox!