Days Until St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day is fixed on 17 March — the traditional date of the saint's death in 461 AD — and the countdown above runs to it live, in your time zone.

What began as an Irish religious feast is now the most globally celebrated national day on the calendar: parades in Dublin, rivers dyed green in Chicago, and landmarks lit green on every continent. The weekday decides how big the party gets — the table below shows the next five.

17 March is the traditional date of Patrick's death in the fifth century, and the day was for centuries a quiet religious observance — Irish pubs were legally closed on it until 1961. The parade tradition began in the diaspora rather than in Ireland: New York's parade dates from 1762, and Boston's claims 1737, both predating anything comparable in Dublin, whose modern festival began only in 1996.

The colour was originally blue. Saint Patrick's Blue appears in Irish heraldry and on the older orders of chivalry; green attached itself through the shamrock, through the 1798 rebellion, and through the landscape. The shamrock story — that Patrick used it to explain the Trinity — appears in no early source and is first recorded more than a thousand years after his death.

Because it falls in Lent, the church has occasionally moved the observance when 17 March collides with Holy Week, most recently in 2008. The civil celebration stays put, which produces the mild oddity of the feast being marked on one date and celebrated on another.

St. Patrick's Day — the next five years