To put into perspective just how much Montrealers love this holiday, allow me to present a brief history. The Montreal St. Patrick’s Day parade has successfully run every year consecutively since 1824, and (last time I checked) is one of the five biggest St. Patrick’s Day parades on the planet. That’s 186 years of parades. Our flag, as it’s known today is only 45 years old, and Canada itself, as an official self-governing nation is only 142 years old.
Now that it’s been established that the people of Montreal have been getting sauced on the Sunday prior to March 17th long before Canada was even a country, I’ll let you in on a little secret – The parade’s actually not all that impressive. The people that go to it are what make it fun.
While it’s got a great vibe and plenty of public boozing, the parade itself has always seemed a little anemic for something so legendary. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not one for parades to begin with, but I can at least understand the draw of say, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in NYC with all its gigantic balloons and mechanical floats. Our parade’s got basically none of that. What it does have is, truck after truck of people dressed in costumes waving, smiling, a few marching bands, many random groups of people on foot and the occasional float with a big leprechaun on it. Oh, and enough flowing alcohol to stop everyone from noticing just how technically unimpressive the parade really is.
People will throw up, children will see and hear things they probably shouldn’t, and everyone will eventually end up with green teeth.
Want to actually be in the parade? No problem, just wander in. Over the years, I’ve seen complete strangers stumble into the middle of the street to lead the marching band and even be handed banners and invited to march with Amnesty International. The crowning achievement of parade crashing came several years back when some people I know got into a group with the Canadian Prime Minister at the time, Paul Martin. He just assumed for some reason they were supposed to be there and slapped them on the back good-naturedly. It took almost 10 minutes for security to realize they didn’t belong and boot them.
In my many years wandering the parade and post-parade festivities, I’ve witnessed some wonderful sights. I’ve seen a man shotgun four consecutive cans of Budweiser in under two minutes and then punch himself in the face for a grand finale. I’ve seen a middle-aged female partier drunk-napping on bench at 1:15 in the afternoon while a fascinated child poked at her with a stick. I’ve seen dozens of people break out into spontaneous renditions of classic Irish tunes to which none of them knew the words. I’ve seen shirtless people painted green, dogs drink beer, a 100 person snowball fight that lasted half-an-hour and took up an entire block. I’ve also seen many, many, many unfortunate hats.
And maybe you can chalk this up to a little luck on my part, but the one thing I haven’t seen in all that time is a fistfight. Well…not a really bad one anyways. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!