St Patrick’s Day
17 March 2027
St Patrick’s Day is 17 March, the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland. In the United States it is a day of parades, green clothing and heavy drinking, and it is not a federal holiday. In 2027 it falls on a Wednesday, and timeanddate.com lists it as a state holiday in Massachusetts, where the same date is also Evacuation Day.
Patrick was a Romano-Briton who was taken to Ireland as a slave as a teenager and returned later as a missionary. Two letters attributed to him, the Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus, are the main sources for his life. He is one of Ireland’s national saints, and he is generally said to have died in the 5th century, on the date the church now keeps as his feast.
The parades did not start in Ireland. The earliest recorded parade was held on 17 March 1601 in what is now St Augustine, Florida, by the Spanish colony’s Irish vicar, Ricardo Artur; the historian J. Michael Francis found the record. Boston held a celebration in 1737, and the first New York parade was in 1762.
The New York parade is the oldest and largest in the world, with about 150,000 marchers and roughly two million spectators each year, according to its organizers. Ireland made 17 March a public holiday in 1903, and the first parade in Dublin was held in the 1930s. The parade marches up Fifth Avenue past St Patrick’s Cathedral, and the taoiseach, Ireland’s prime minister, takes part.
In the United States the day has an American menu: corned beef and cabbage, soda bread and green beer. In Ireland it remained mostly a religious occasion through the 20th century, with Mass and a family meal, and the parades there are a later development. Boston and Chicago hold large parades of their own, and Massachusetts closes its state offices.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Saint Patrick”
- HISTORY, “First St. Patrick’s Day parade”
- FOX 13 News, “The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in the U.S. was actually held in Florida, historians say”
- NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade, “About”
- Timeanddate.com, “Holidays and Observances in the United States in 2027”
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