Happy St Patt's Weekend!

[Jock Scot]

I love the Irish Guards with their distinctive green and orange uniforms!

If you don't mind.The Irish Guards wear saffron coloured kilts, NOT orange!

[Patty Logan]

If you don't mind. The Irish Guards wear saffron coloured kilts, NOT orange!

Sorry my apologies

[OC Richard]

Just so you know St. Patricks Day is not celebrated in Scotland to the extent ----if at all -----that you chaps do across the Atlantic. I think there is a parade of some sort in Glasgow, but I am not aware of any others here. The Irish Guards unsurprisingly do also celebrate the day wherever they happen to be based at the time.

Thanks, I didn't know the situation in Scotland.

I can't find my notes now, so this is off the top of my head, but New York City has had a St Patrick's Day Parade since around 1750, started by some British army officers.

Edit: Dublin Ireland's first official St Patrick's Day Parade was in 1931. I read somewhere that it was initially a military parade.

In the 1990s Dublin began capitalising on the holiday by turning it into a weeklong festival.

For Americans St Pat's is a day of excessive drinking, while pubs in Ireland were closed that day until the 1970s.

Here in the USA such things aren't limited to the descendants of Irish immigrants.

Oktoberfest is another big excuse for excessive drinking here.

Here in the US southwest people of Mexican ancestry celebrate Cinco de Mayo, which I'm told is a much bigger thing in the US than it is in Mexico.