St. Patrick's Day is right around the corner and Massachusetts is ready to celebrate!

Now three years out from the start of the pandemic for the first time with zero restrictions Massachusetts residents will get to celebrate March 17 in proper fashion.

While St. Patrick's Day is traditionally an Irish holiday celebrating the feast day of their patron saint, originally celebrated with religious feasts and services, Since then the day has become a celebration of Irish culture in the U.S. The Americanized version of the holiday has more to do with green beer rather than an actual celebration of the Irish culture, but you know, that's just what we do.

St. Patrick's Day in Massachusetts is a huge deal. There are tons of large city-wide celebrations including the very notable and beloved Boston and Holyoke parades. The way we celebrate here in the Bay State, you'd think we're all Irish, or at least of Irish descent, but that's not exactly the case.

New Hampshire is actually the state with the highest population of people of Irish descent. Using data from the U.S. Census Ancestry, Zippia determined that 20.2% of New Hampshire residents claim Irish ancestry.

 

Massachusetts does come in at number two right behind our neighbors to the north and the margin is pretty minuscule. Zippia confirmed that 20% of Massachusetts residents claim Irish heritage.

What city in Massachusetts has the highest concentration of people of Irish descent?

Scituate has a higher concentration of Irish folks than anywhere else in Massachusetts. According to Irish Times, recent census data shows that Scituate is actually the most Irish city in the country.

The Scituate St. Patrick's Day Parade is extremely popular among the South Shore and Cape Cod communities. Over 15,000 people attend each year, nearly doubling the population of the town.

LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.

 

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

 

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