Waking up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday to head to Collegetown in seven-degree weather is not something I ever expected to do willingly. But St. Patrick’s Day at Cornell operates on a very different schedule.
By the time my fellow sorority sisters and I made it to Catherine Street on March 14, fraternity annexes were already overflowing with crowds decked out in green. For my first St. Patrick’s Day darties, it quickly became clear that the celebration kicked off long before most students would typically consider leaving their beds on a weekend.
I’m not exactly a morning person, especially when Ithaca's weather has snapped back to its usual drab gray and bitter cold — particularly after teasing spring just a few days earlier. But skipping any of the festivities felt it would be a disservice to both my sorority and my Irish heritage — despite how minimal the latter may be. So, bright and early, I pulled on my St. Patrick’s Day merchandise, twinned with my sisters and braced the cold as we headed towards the crowds gathering rapidly in Collegetown.
By 11:30 a.m., several fraternity annex backyards were already filled to the brim. Sorority sisters congregated together, deciding which darty they felt compelled to enter first. Despite temperatures that felt closer to zero degrees than spring, the crowds rallied anyway. Within 15 minutes, my fingers were completely numb, but luckily the packed annexes offered some relief in the form of body heat.
Compared to the darties of Homecoming weekend, the weather was exponentially worse. But being in a sorority does come with one practical advantage on days like this: access. One of the nicer parts of the day was not having to try and name-drop random brothers at the door to get inside. Instead, we could walk into houses where we actually recognized the brothers hosting.
One fraternity even had a grill going outside, handing out breakfast sandwiches with bacon and eggs to steady the stream of stumbling visitors. Meanwhile, other backyards were packed fence-to-fence by noon.
Looking around, it was always easy to spot familiar faces. One of my most memorable moments came while dancing with my big who showed up with a full box of Lucky Charms cereal and began pouring handfuls into the mouths of fellow sisters.
The real entertainment, though, was the creativity of the labels decorating the “BORGs,” or Blackout Rage Gallons, people carried. Everywhere you looked, there were puns and pop culture references: “Call Your U-Borg,” “No Broke Borgs” — a clever twist on the Tinashe song frequently played from the fraternity DJs’ playlist — and the classic play on our city’s motto, “Ithaca is Borges.” Some gallons were neon green, others bright shades of red, and a few turned questionable shades of brown after a few hours of mixing.
Although I’m still learning the names of the more than 50 sisters in my new member class, days like this make the chapter feel smaller and closer. No matter how well I knew a sister, everyone felt comfortable running up to one another without hesitation.
By mid-afternoon, the celebration had expanded across multiple Collegetown streets. Around 2 p.m., another St. Patrick’s Day spectacle took place on Linden Avenue: the Ginger Run. More than 200 redheads — from bright copper to strawberry blonde — gathered at the top of the steep road before tumbling downhill together in a chaotic but beautiful display of Cornell unity.
Eventually, the crowds began thinning, and after a long morning in the cold, I made the tiring trek back to North Campus for a much-needed afternoon nap.
What surprised me most about the day was not just the scale of celebration despite the frigid wind, but the sense of community within it. Whether it was dancing with sisters, laughing at ridiculous jug names or watching hundreds of gingers sprint down a hill together, St. Patrick’s Day darties turned out to be one of Cornell’s uniquely chaotic, freezing and extremely memorable traditions.
For a first experience, I’d say Cornell's St. Paddy’s Day reputation definitely lived up to its name.
Savannah Sandhaus is a first-year in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at sjs482@cornell.edu.
