St. Patrick's Day traditions made in America

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated by millions of people in the United States every year, with people seeing the yearly revelry as a pot of gold for drinking and socializing, all while decked out in green.

While St. Patrick’s Day, celebrated on March 17 to mark the anniversary of the saint’s death, is of major importance to the Irish community, many of the traditions celebrated both in America and worldwide hold little basis in Irish culture.

For many traditions, the green of St. Patrick’s Day has been painted over with a heavy dose of red, white and blue.

St. Patty’s Day or St. Paddy’s Day?

The term “St. Patty’s Day” has become a commonly used colloquialism in the United States for St. Patrick’s Day. The shortening of the name most likely came from the nickname “Patty,” according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it’s a name that is technically incorrect in Irish culture.

In Ireland, the name Patty is short for Patricia, while the name Patrick is the anglicized form of the name Pádraig. St. Pádraig was born in Britain before being taken to Ireland as a prisoner and ultimately introduced Christianity to Ireland, earning him the honor of Ireland’s most prominent patron saint.

That means technically the name of the holiday is St. Pádraig’s Day, and in turn, St. Paddy’s Day.

Drinking on St. Patrick’s Day 

St. Patrick’s Day is the third-heaviest drinking day in America, according to a survey of over 1,000 people conducted by alcohol.org.

Though drinking was never a part of the original holiday in Ireland. But it was, in fact, Irish immigrants to the United States who first incorporated revelry into the proceedings, celebrating their Irish culture together despite being so far from home.

The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade — another American creation — took place in Boston in 1737 and other U.S. cities soon followed suit.

In Ireland, however, for much of the holiday’s existence, local pubs closed so that people could observe the holiday’s religious side, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that pubs remained open in Ireland as the country followed suit in its celebrations along with the rest of the world.

The Irish and corned beef

The closer we get to St. Patrick’s Day the more you’ll see the “traditional” Irish meal of corned beef and cabbage on menus around the United States.

But the Irish never used to eat beef — beef wasn’t widely available for much of Ireland’s history, so instead, the traditional meal would consist of Irish bacon and cabbage.

But when Irish expats to the United States arrived on the East Coast, corned beef was one of the easiest and cheapest meats for people to get their hands on. So Irish bacon was quickly substituted with corned beef among Irish Americans.

Wearing of the green

St. Patrick’s Day remained a religious holiday in Ireland until the mid-to-late 1900s, but wearing green became a thing in America around the time that parades began, in the early 1700s.

Green was worn for multiple reasons, but one of the earliest reasons was because revelers held that wearing green would make them invisible to leprechauns,
who, according to legend, would pinch people who were not wearing green (and therefore not invisible).