St. Patrick’s Day is March 17th.
- St. Patrick’s Day is the national day of Ireland. It is a public holiday in Ireland.
- St. Patrick’s Day in on the anniversary of the death of St. Patrick. St. Patrick was a priest who worked in Ireland and Britain. However, it is believed he was born in Wales.
- Green is the traditional colour of Ireland, and a lot of people wear green on St. Patrick’s Day (however, a long time ago St. Patrick was normally shown wearing blue).
- The usual manner of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is for a parade, for people to wear green, and people to drink a lot of alcohol. However, it is traditionally a religious festival, so religious people also have a feast.
- Ireland’s alcohol companies have used St. Patrick’s Day to do heavy, and successful, promotion. Guinness, the country’s most successful beer company, sells 15% of its yearly beer in March, with people around the world drinking twice as much Guinness (over 10 billion pints) as they do on a normal day. Some people think Guinness has hijacked St. Patrick’s Day and made people think of it as ‘drink a Guinness day’.
- Although it is an Irish holiday, many people of Irish descent celebrate the day around the world. New York, Savannah, Chicago and Boston – American cities with large Irish connections – have parades that are nearly as big (or bigger) than the parade in Ireland’s capital city, Dublin. Chicago and Savannah also dye the city’s river green for the day.