Rain or shine, hell or high water, the Dallas Mavericks’ sponsored St. Patrick’s Day parade and green-beer drunken festivities will go on. After all, it’s a real money maker for the City of Dallas. The parade and celebration has been repeated every year on Greenville Avenue since 1979, except in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on most parades and gatherings across our nation. In 2012, it was nearly cancelled due to rising costs (didn’t make money any more), but Mark Cuban stepped in to shore it up financially. I guess that’s when it became the “Dallas Maverick’s Parade”.
Like so many fabricated celebratory dates in the U.S., St. Patrick’s Day is just another one of those “let’s create a made-up ‘holiday’ and convince people to celebrate it so we can harvest another revenue opportunity.” For starters, St. Patrick wasn’t even Irish. He was born in the 14th century as ‘Maewyn Succat’ in Roman Britain, and raise British until about 21 years old, when he was captured by Irish kidnappers and enslaved in Ireland. He later escaped to another part of Europe where he was trained as a priest before finally returning to Ireland to spread Christianity. Several centuries later in the 1700’s, he was made a saint by the Catholic Church and like other saints had a day dedicated to him, which was March 17th.
While St. Patrick’s Day was marked with mostly a religious framing and solemnity in Ireland until well into the 20th century, in the United States it became the ridiculous and boisterous celebration it is today, marked by lots of green beer and most of its attendees without a trace of Irish heritage. By contrast, in Ireland bars are closed on St. Patrick’s Day in observance of the day’s religious significance. In the America, the day is commemorated with overindulgence of alcohol and beer.
The citizens of Dallas are comprised of approximately 3.66% Asian, 4.4% Irish, 23.61% African, and 48.14% Anglo decent, with all other races totaling 10.88%. So with so little Irish heritage in this city, why is St. Patrick’s Day billed a such a ‘big event’? The answer is promotion, promotion, promotion. Nothing says ‘Ka-ching’ like massing a hundred-thousand people together for a made-up celebration that are anxious to spend their hard-earned cash on cheap Chinese trinkets and green beer. And those cash-registers get a work-out from 9am in the morning until 2am the following morning.
And what about those ‘trinkets’. First, wearing green stems from the nickname for Ireland as the “Emerald Isles”. Four-leaf clovers never really had anything to do with St. Patrick (Maewyn Succat). He mused about the three-leaf clover representing the Christian trinity of Father-Son-Holy Ghost. But the “Luck of the Irish” and “Leprechauns” were never associated with him until the celebration transformations in the U.S. centuries later.
Bottom line is it’s all nonsense, like Halloween and Valentines Day. Just another fabricated holiday designed to part you with your money. And you fall for it each and every time. So happy St. Patrick’s Day, whatever the hell that means.
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