Facts That Take the Blarney Out of St. Patrick’s Day
1 The patron saint of Ireland isn’t actually Irish. According to some accounts, St. Patrick’s real name was Maewyn Succat and he was born in what is now Britain (gasp!) around the end of the fourth century. He was kidnapped by Irishmen when he was 16, found religion in captivity, and ultimately became a proselytizing priest.
2 St. Patrick did convert many pagans to Christianity, but the story of his driving all the snakes out of Ireland during his 40-day fast on a hilltop is bunk. Biologists think the reason Ireland is snake-free today is that the reptiles never migrated to the island in the first place. The legend of the snakes is probably just a metaphor for St. Patrick’s having driven evil out of Ireland.
3 Green wasn’t always the color of St. Patrick’s Day. Paintings show the patron saint wearing blue robes, and the official color of the dormant Order of St. Patrick was sky blue. In 1541, British monarch Henry VIII declared himself the king of Ireland and gave the country a royal-blue coat of arms. But as disenchantment with British rule grew over the centuries, the Irish adopted green as a symbol of rebellion.
4 St. Patrick’s Day used to be a solemn commemoration of the day he died. In 1927, Irish officials even banned the sale of alcohol on his name day (as well as on Christmas and Good Friday), partly at the insistence of the Catholic Church. Until the early 1960s, one of the only places you could buy a beer in Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day was the wellattended Royal Dublin Dog Show. Commercial pressure led to the lifting of the ban in 1960.
5 March 17 ranks fourth on the list of booziest holidays in America, behind New Year’s Eve, Christmas, and the Fourth of July. The drink of choice around the world: Guinness. In 2019, revelers are expected to down 13 million pints of it.
6 Slightly less popular but with its own rabid fan base: Mcdonald’s Shamrock Shake. The restaurant chain created a “Mcdonald’s Finder” app last year to help customers track down the minty green confection—and it is a confection. A large Shamrock contains
800 calories and
113 grams of sugar.
7 Boston and New York both claim to have hosted the first St. Patrick’s
Day Parade in the 1700s (though they quibble over the definition of a parade). That said, the first procession honoring the Irish saint may have taken place in 1601, when residents of the Spanishspeaking settlement of St. Augustine, Florida, marched through the streets in recognition of St. Patrick—or San Patricio, in this case— whom they considered the official protector of their fields of maize.
8 big cities try to claim bragging rights for the day’s top celebrations, but they aren’t the only parties in town. Montserrat, aka the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean, throws a St. Patrick’s Festival that lasts more than a week.
9 In 1962, the Chicago Plumbers Union Local 130 realized that the dye they used to locate leaks in buildings could double as an eco-friendly decoration. The Windy City has been dyeing the Chicago River green for the holiday ever