St. Patrick’s Day took me by surprise. I was running a fever that day, but I needed to take my dog to the vet (we were a sorry pair). We ventured forth. The scene on the street was crazy. There was a line up the block to get into The Bus Stop, which is a kind of divey/sports bar type place on Union Street. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Actually, that’s not true. On St. Patrick’s Day the year I lived in Boston, I found myself walking down Charles Street, which is kind of the main drag in Beacon Hill, at about 3 in the afternoon. It was a Tuesday afternoon–some day in the middle of the week, anyway–and people were camping out all over the place. Some were inside bars holding tables, and others were outside bars, waiting to get in and pounce on tables.

Since I know nothing about St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to do a little research. The holiday (also known as the Feast of St. Patrick) commemorates (big shock) St. Patrick, one of Ireland’s patron saints, and marks the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. St. Patrick was initially associated with the color blue, although green eventually got the upper hand–Ireland is referred to as “The Emerald Isle,” after all.

According to Huffington Post, “people in Ireland do not wear as much green or celebrate quite as wildly as revelers do elsewhere, although there is a legend that wearing green makes you invisible to leprechauns that will pinch you if they can see you.” I guess that’s good to know.