Saint Patrick’s Day, a holiday famous for drinking, dyeing one of the nation’s most well-known rivers the color green and, apparently, getting assaulted if you aren’t wearing the aforementioned color on Saint Paddy’s Day itself.
Pinching on Saint Patrick’s Day, a relatively old tradition dating back to the 1700’s, came about from Irish-American people wanting to celebrate their home country and make it more appealing for Americans, according to Christian Science Monitor. The idea was that wearing green, the color in the country’s flag, made you invisible to leprechauns, tiny little men who would pinch you for absolutely no reason. For a holiday that was originally started to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, this tradition seems like the definition of Americanization.
Last year, I received approximately thirty pinches because I wasn’t “green enough,” both from family and friends. That experience left me bruised and thinking about why this tradition is still a thing today. America has twisted Saint Patrick’s Day so much that we’ve even changed the traditional color from blue to green in an attempt to relate more to Ireland. Don’t get me wrong, Saint Patrick’s is a fun day, but my problem is how far we take this seemingly innocuous holiday. It’s not just the pinching, it’s how aggressively far we take the other aspects of this holiday. The biggest one: drinking.
According to the Diversified Monitoring Society, the average person consumes 4.2 drinks during this holiday, with over 30% of American men admitting to binge drinking. Alcohol sales go up by 150%, and, unfortunately, so does the rate of drunk driving fatalities. According to the LRADAC foundation, one person dies every thirty minutes due to a drunk driving accident on Saint Patrick’s day. In 2019, 63% of car related fatalities on March 17 involved one drunk driver. People should not be dyeing simply because a holiday tells us to drink.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, far from it. I think some of the traditions are fun, and it’s a nice day to have in the middle of March, a very barren month in terms of holidays. I’m just suggesting that we should tone all the hype about drinking down, especially with the spike in drunk driving fatalities since 2019. A holiday shouldn’t be celebrating adults binging on alcohol, potentially endangering the lives of multiple people. Yes, we are only teenagers, but if we see binge-drinking being glorified now, we’re more likely to over-indulge as adults.
And please, for the love of all things green, stop pinching me. It’s annoying.
This is my neighbor’s pool, decorated for Saint Patrick’s Day. Celebrating in ways like this are fun, it’s the more harmful aspects of this holiday I get worried about. If you want to dye your water green like the Chicago River, go right ahead. (Photo/Ruby Hedge)
