“America celebrates St. Patrick’s Day like no other country,” says Dublin brewer Fergal Murray, “even Ireland.” With 34 million Americans claiming Irish ancestry, it’s hardly surprising. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade was organized on March 17, 1766 in New York (not Ireland!) by homesick Irish soldiers serving in the English army a decade before the American Revolution. By the mid-1800s, after the potato famine had driven a million Irish to the United States, immigrants began to organize. Their political support, known as the “green machine,” was often critical to a candidate’s success, and many astute politicians used the parade to enhance campaigns. Irish Americans watched with pride when President Harry Truman attended the 1948 St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan, and to this day the parade is a spectacle with 150,000 marchers and 2 million viewers.
The history of St. Patrick himself – the patron saint of Ireland – is fascinating, considering that he was neither Irish nor Christian at birth. Born to a pagan British family at the end of the 4th century, he was abducted at 16 by Irish rogues, shipped to Ireland, and sold to a landowner. He spent 6 years herding sheep in Ireland, then escaped to a monastery in Gaul (France). Returning 15 years later to Ireland as a missionary, the enterprising Patrick used unconventional techniques to convert locals to Christianity; to celebrate Easter, for example, he lit a bonfire at the top of a hill, knowing that the largely pagan peasantry was accustomed to honoring its gods with fire. He also used the common 3-leaf clover (the shamrock), which the cows and horses all munched on, to explain the holy trinity to his converts: 3 separate parts that are united as one. March 17 was the day of his death (one’s birth was not as important as the day one ascended into heaven…note that the Bible never mentions December 25…but that’s another story) and his followers adopted the custom of wearing shamrocks on March 17 – a 1,500 year old tradition that endures. (Interestingly, in the 1790s, during the Irish rebellion, the ‘wearin’ o’ the green’ was punishable by death, and it’s STILL an expression of Irish identification.) As it was a Catholic holy day, the pubs throughout Ireland were closed on St. Patrick’s Day until the 1970s. Today you can get a Guinness, of course, and even the Lenten prohibition on eating meat is lifted as the Irish dance, drink, and eat corned beef and cabbage.
There are loads of St. Patrick’s Day traditions. My kids awakened to find the toilet water green, as well as green milk in their cereal. Last night they left little traps to catch a leprechaun, that mischievous, cranky character that has inhabited Irish mythology since pre-Celtic times and is thought to guard the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I bet they won’t catch one, but the leprechauns may leave gold chocolate coins as a sign of having been there.
Other traditions:
Visit the Irish Hunger Memorial in New York. This serene garden memorial in lower Manhattan is a down-to-earth tribute (constructed with imported Irish sod and stones) to the million-and-a-half people who lost their lives during the great famine of 1846–1850. From a roofless stone cottage, a winding path leads up a small hill with stunning views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It’s also a tranquil (and free) introduction to Irish history and the story of immigration to the United States.
Attend a big, no-holds-barred St. Patrick’s Day parade: New York’s may be the largest, but Chicago not only has a parade but dyes the Chicago River emerald green, which they’ve done so since 1962 (when enterprising pollution engineers used a chemical they invented for determining illegal sewage discharges in the river) to go all out on St. Paddie’s Day. Boston’s Southie parade is the second largest in the U.S. with a turn out of more than a half-million spectators. Among the oldest are Atlanta’s parade, inaugurated in 1881, and Savannah’s, founded in 1824.
The Kelly family, who owned Brodie Mountain Ski Resort in western Massachusetts for decades (and gave their trails names like “Long Way to Tipperary”), celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with an Irish Olympics Festival that included a limbo-on-skis contest, three-legged downhill races, a slush jump, and a three-mile run on green snow. If you could prove your name was Kelly, you got a free lift ticket, too.
In some ways, St. Patrick’s Day is the first green of spring. So, go ahead, wear shamrocks, drink green beer (or milk), watch a parade, and watch your back. When I was a kid if you didn’t wear green to school you got pinched.
