Results tagged “bunkerhill”

--Are you freaking out over the fact that the St. Patrick's Day parade falls on the same day as Palm Sunday, March 16? 'Cause the press sure seems to be making a fuss. [Boston Herald, Boston Globe]

Walking to work today, Bostonist saw two people a day early in their full-out St. Patrick's Day Irish gear (green paper hat, "all about drinking and Irishness in a hard-drinking, heavily Irish town. But part of us clings to the belief that if people only knew more about Evacuation Day - commemorating an actual Revolutionary War victory in Boston (unlike Bunker Hill Day) - they would embrace it as we do. To that end, some...

When Bostonist didn't get into Harvard Law School, we settled for another fine, albeit architecturally challenged, institution in the area (and married a Harvard grad student, which made us feel much better). But according to a story in today's New York Times, high school students rejected by Harvard College are increasingly doing bachelor's degrees at the Harvard Extension School, seeing it as the Harvard experience on the cheap. (Why not just go to community college, you ask? A Harvard writing instructor exlpains: "People say Harvard-trained, they don't say Bunker Hill Community College-trained." Ouch.)

With the oppressive pseudo-summer turning back to comfortable spring for a few days before summer actually begins, Bostonist's thoughts are turning to the weekend and to upcoming holidays and events. (Ordinarily, we would say that the beginning of summer is a good reason to celebrate, but we have the impression that everyone's pretty much fed up with summer for now.) If you work in Suffolk County, you probably have Friday off in honor of Bunker Hill Day, which commemorates, oddly, a loss by the revolutionary army to the hated redcoats. Why do we celebrate a loss? Well, for the same reason that Bostonist's softball team thinks fondly of the game three weeks ago in which we were defeated 17-12: it was a close loss and showed we could actually play (unlike our other three losses, which featured the invocation of the mercy rule). The Battle of Bunker Hill (which, as third-grade history teachers are surely reminding us right now, was actually fought on Breed's Hill) showed the British that the Americans had some fight in them and were not going to be easily defeated. (It was also the occasion on which General William Prescott is said to have advised his troops, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," which is somehow evocative of underdog toughness.) If that strikes you as insufficient motivation for a day off, you clearly aren't well acquainted with Boston's special relationship with paid holidays.

Monday is Patriots Day, another one of those Massachusetts-only holidays that Bostonist adores. Some cynics suggest that it is no accident that two of our unique holidays, Evacuation Day and Patriots Day, fall on occasions usually celebrated with hearty amounts of drink (St. Patrick's Day and the Boston Marathon), and the third, Bunker Hill Day, saves June from being a month without time off and falls conveniently half-way between Memorial Day and July 4th. Bostonist...