Boston St. Paddy's Partying Not Enough To Be No. 1

BOSTON, MA – St. Patrick's Day may be Boston's Mardi Gras, but it appears we've lost a step. WalletHub's 2018 list of the best places to celebrate our holiday (Ireland notwithstanding) ranked Boston second behind Chicago. What's next, Fat Tuesday parades in Fargo?

Someone better tell the Onion, who wagged their finger at Boston while completely ignoring Chicago's debauchery. Anyone with a younger sibling can relate.

"By all means, you can drink a couple beers, even green beers, and have a good time, but maybe cool it with the Jameson shots and definitely no Irish coffee, okay?" the Onion chastised. "Remember, you racked up $42 million in medical bills last St. Patrick’s, and that’s before accounting for fire department overtime."

The satire website reminded us that binge drinking, bare-knuckle boxing and drunkenly scaling a car to cheer on bare-knuckle boxers are not requisites to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, a holiday that is typically more muted and religious in Ireland.

Americans are expected to spend about $5.9 billion celebrating St. Paddy's this year, which amounts to roughly $40 a person. Much of that money will be spent on beer sales, which jump by about 153 percent on St. Patrick's Day. Guinness, of course, leads the pack with a whopping 819 percent increase, according to personal finance site WalletHub, which said 13 million pints will be consumed.

And Boston is the second-best place to consume them, according to WalletHub. Chicago (allegedly) kisses the blarney stone better than anyone else, but those try-hards win only because they dye the Chicago River green each year.

The ranking criteria includes things like St. Patrick’s Day traditions, the number of Irish pubs and restaurants per capita, the cost of a night’s lodging at a three-star hotel on St. Patrick’s Day and the weather forecast. Read more about the methodology here.

These are the top 10 cities to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day:

1. Chicago, Illinois
2. Boston, Massachusetts
3. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
4. Buffalo, New York
5. New York, New York
6. San Francisco, California
7. Fort Collins, Colorado
8. Tampa, Florida
9. Madison, Wisconsin
10. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The earliest St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the United States date to the 18th Century — 1737 in Massachusetts and 1762 in New York — but the mass popularity of the holiday began in the 19th Century with a wave of Irish immigrants following the potato famine, according to Karen Sonnelitter, an assistant professor of history at Siena College in Albany, New York, one of the experts WalletHub cited in its report.

“The Irish were a generally despised immigrant community then, and many scholars have concluded that St. Patrick’s Day celebrations were a way to assert their cultural and political presence,” she said on WalletHub’s website.

Timing also plays a role, according to Victor Luftig, an English professor and director of the Center for Liberal Arts at the University of Virginia.

“Seasonal cultures relish spring festivals, ways of shaking free of the hardships of winter, and the space between Christmas and Easter is a long one,” he said.

Also, he said, Easter doesn’t really license exuberant celebrations as do New Year’s Eve and the 4th of July, which split the year in half.

“So,” he said, “St. Patrick’s Day makes for a useful bridge.”

Here are more fun facts from the report:

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Source: WalletHub

The data used to compile the report were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, INRIX, Council for Community and Economic Research, Eventbrite, Kayak.com, Walk Score, St-Patricks-Day.com, each city’s official page for its “St. Patrick’s Day Parade,” Yelp and AccuWeather.

Read the full report.

Photo via Shutterstock