Happy St Patricks Day!

While many of us use this holiday (and the days before and after) to drink and eat, it's also a good time for a little history lesson :) Yeah, there is some guy who was named "Saint Patrick", but thats boring. Lets talk about something interesting ... the dying of the Chicago River! It's one of the things that makes St. Pats such a great event in Chicago, and a tradition that dates back to 1962. According to the History Channel, the idea stemmed from the green dye city pollution-control workers used trace illegal sewage discharges. When someone realized this method might be useful in more ways tha one, making a unique way to celebrate St Pats. In 1962 the city released 100 pounds of green vegetable dye into the river (enough to keep it green for a week) and we have been doing it every year since! (Nowadays, in order to minimize environmental damage, only forty pounds of dye are used, making the river green for only several hours.) This tradition is a big enough deal to have an entire website dedicated to it!