Good evening!!

Are you wearing your green today?? I am!!!

I thought today it would be fun to share some fun facts about St Patrick’s Day:

1. St Patrick wasn’t Irish.The man whom the holiday honors was born in Britain to Roman parents in the third century. As a teenager, he was kidnapped and spirited away to Ireland, where he was enslaved and forced to work as a shepherd for seven years.
2. JFK forgot St Patrick’s Day. You’d think the first Irish-American president would have celebrated St. Patrick’s Day like no other commander in chief, but it wasn’t so. When Ireland’s ambassador to America, then Thomas Kiernan, met with President John Kennedy in the Oval Office 50 years ago, he presented the president with a bowl of shamrocks flown in from Ireland and a decorated scroll featuring the Kennedy coat of arms. Kennedy was delighted with the gifts, but had forgotten it was St. Patrick’s Day until just before the meeting. A staffer had to rush to find him something green to wear, settling on a tie.
3. There are more Irish Americans than Irish. Some 36.5 million Americans claim Irish heritage, according to the US Census Bureau. Ireland, on the other hand, has a population of about 6 million.
4. The Chicago River runs green. Chicago is famous for dyeing the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day. The tradition began in 1962, when a pipe fitters union—with the permission of the mayor—poured a hundred pounds (45 kilograms) of green vegetable dye into the river. (On the job, the workers often use colored dyes to track illegal sewage dumping.) Today only 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of dye are used, enough to turn the river green for several hours.
5. In Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, people traditionally wear a small bunch of shamrocks on their jackets or caps. Children wear orange, white and green badges, and women and girls wear green ribbons in their hair.
6. The name “lephrechaun” has several origins. It could be from the Irish Gaelic word “leipreachan,” which means “a kind of aqueous sprite.” Or, it could be from “leath bhrogan,” which means “shoemaker.”
7. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the highest number of leaves found on a clover is 14!
8. One estimate suggests that there are about 10 000 regular three-leaf clovers for every lucky four-leaf clover.
9. Legend says that each leaf of the clover means something: the first is for hope, the second for faith, the third for love and the fourth for luck.
10. The shamrock is the traditional symbol because St. Patrick used it to explain the connection between the father, the son, and the holy spirit in the Christian religion.
11. On average, every American consumes 22 gallons of beer per year.
12. The children and grandchildren of people born in Ireland can obtain dual citizenship with the US and Ireland.
13. At one time, there were more Irish living in New York City, than in Dublin, Ireland.
14. Corned beef is strictly an American invention, the Irish don’t actually eat it to celebrate the day.
15. St. Patrick’s isn’t a big drinking holiday in Ireland. In fact, many of the local pubs are closed for the day.
16. Leprechauns are the official shoe makers of the fairy kingdom.
17. Shamrocks are the national flower of Ireland and are picked on St. Patrick’s Day and worn on the shoulder.
18. The ancient Irish used to wear green to show their love for the harvest gods.
19. Over 41.5 billion pounds of beef are produced each year for St. Patrick’s Day, with the majority of it coming from Texas and over 2.5 billion pounds of cabbage are produced with the majority grown in California.
20. Over 8 million St. Patrick’s Day cards are exchanged in America making today the ninth-largest card selling occasion in the US.
21. Over 94 million people plan to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day.
22. The original Guinness Brewery in Dublin has a 9,000 year lease.
23. The Oscar was handcrafted by an Irishman, Cedric Gibbons, who was born in Dublin in 1823.
24. In Seattle, there is a ceremony where a green stripe is painted down the roads.
25. Most people attend mass in the morning and then attend the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
26. The phrase, “Drowning The Shamrock” is from the custom of floating the shamrock on the top of whiskey before drinking it. The Irish believe that if you keep the custom, then you will have a prosperous year.
27. In the United States, it’s customary to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. But in Ireland the color was long considered to be unlucky, says Bridget Haggerty, author of The Traditional Irish Wedding and the Irish Culture and Customs Web site.  As Haggerty explains, Irish folklore holds that green is the favorite color of the Good People (the proper name for faeries). They are likely to steal people, especially children, who wear too much of the color.
28. By law, pubs in Ireland were closed on St. Patrick’s Day, a national religious holiday, as recently as the 1970s.
29. Guinness stout, first brewed by Arthur Guinness in Dublin, Ireland, in 1759, has become synonymous with Ireland and Irish bars. According to the company’s Web site, 1,883,200,000 (that’s 1.9 billion) pints of Guinness are consumed around the world every year.
30. Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th-century Scottish author of Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and other novels, brought a store of Guinness with him during a trip to Samoa in the South Pacific, according to the Guinness Web site.
31. Ireland is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) long and 200 miles (320 kilometers) wide. Those facts, along with other features, led Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson to recently conclude that the Atlantic Ocean island is the same one identified by ancient Greek philosopher Plato as Atlantis in his famous dialogues Timaeus and Critias.

As I spend this St Patty’s Day with my husband, who by the way, I get to pinch because he isn’t wearing his green!!

Have a FABULOUS evening!!! 😉