The 25th Annual St. Patrick's Day Parade

The Seaside Heights/Seaside Park St. Patrick's Day Parade is a very big deal. It was estimated that 75,000 people attended last year's event and the expectation for this year is that anywhere from 70,000 – 100,000 people will descend on the Jersey shore to enjoy the area's best parade of the year.

The officially named "2009 Ocean County Saint Patrick's Day Parade" is scheduled for Saturday March 14. The marching will begin at noon from Seaside Park and follow a 1 1-2 mile route that ends along the north end of the Boulevard in Seaside Heights. The parade will last about 1 1-2 hours. In the unfortunate event the weather is bad, the rain date is Sunday March 15.

One of the goals of the parade's co-chairmen is to have the best parade possible. They are working hard to create a parade experience that features quality, fun, exciting participants rather than trying to have a parade the fills lots of time. There will be all the traditional favorites that you would expect in a Saint Patrick's Day Parade: marching bands (High Schools and others), bagpipers, dancers, color guards, other ensembles, and floats. One of the planned highlights for this year will be the bagpipers. The Bagpiper Bands will first participate in the main parade, showing up in the mix of marchers walking the parade route. Then once the main parade ends all the bagpiper ensembles will reassemble and begin a new parade that will march north to south down the Boardwalk. If you like Bagpipes you will not want to miss this!

Seaside Heights now treats the parade as the start of the tourism season, meaning many seasonal businesses will be open for the first time in 2009. Hotels, restaurants, and many of the Boardwalk's merchants – whether they are year round operations or not - spend a lot of time preparing for the crowds that descend on their town for
the parade. This means enjoying the Saint Patrick's Day Parade can be part of a planned all day visit to the area. You will be able to enjoy a meal or two at many area restaurants and will find many open merchants along the boardwalk. Since many places will be crowded in Seaside Park and Seaside Heights, you might also consider planning to eat in Tom's River as you are heading home in the afternoon or evening.

If you want to learn more about the parade, you can visit the parade's official website.

An Old Irish Blessing

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Image information: Many of the pictures shown on this page are presented under a Creative Commons license. You can see more work by the photographers featured here by following the links provided in the following attributions. The St. Patrick's banner and the green top hat photograph were taken by infomatique. These pictures are part of a large interesting collection taken during a Dublin St. Patty's parade. The jolly looking parade watcher was taken by ccs-pics. The cute pupster was caught enjoying the parade by chidorian

I appreciate the photographers' generosity in sharing their work.

Please consider sharing about your experiences at the 2009 parade. So once the parade has finished, come on back and add your comments. If you send us any pictures you want to share, we will post those too! You can find out about submitting content here or you can just leave a comment below if you would like.

This page will be archived and become a historical record of the 2009 St. Patrick's Day Parade. Don't you want to be a part of history?