With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, here’s a look at the widely-seen mythical creatures.
Not the Boston Celtics or the Notre Dame Fighting Irish mascots: This is the most popular leprechaun in the U.S.
Every year March 17 marks St. Patrick’s Day, a cultural and religious celebration of the Patron Saint of Ireland.
In recent decades the day has morphed into a global festival of Irishness, with many cities in the United States turning green for the day. For some detractors, these more commercialised expressions of St. Patrick’s Day serve to propagate stereotypes of Ireland, with pints of Guinness and shamrock images seen everywhere
The Irish imagery also includes leprechauns, the diminutive fictional beings of Irish folklore. The small, bearded men are depicted in green with a pot of gold and they have become a common sight in attempts to market Ireland in the US.
Which is the most famous leprechaun mascot?
The Boston Celtics have Lucky the Leprechaun on the team’s logo, and the Notre Dame Leprechaun is the official mascot of the University of Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish sports teams. But the most popular, and certainly the most prominent, is seen in millions of households every single morning. The Lucky Charms cereal box.
🥣In March 1964, General Mills introduced Lucky Charms cereal pic.twitter.com/MhGOQPsA9S
— RetroNewsNow (@RetroNewsNow) March 17, 2024
The popular breakfast cereal features Lucky, a leprechaun mascot introduced in 1964. Lucky has been a part of the Lucky Charms brand since its inception, aside from a brief spell in which ‘Waldo the Wizard’ was used to market the product in New England.
More than 60 years on from its introduction, Lucky Charms remains one of the most popular cereals in the US. A 2021 Mintel study found that 86.4 million boxes of Lucky Charms are sold every year in the US, with total revenue for producers General Mills standing at $283.4 million.
The first boxes of Lucky Charms cereal were sold on St. Patrick’s Day 1964, with the whole marketing campaign designed to play into the leprechaun character’s supposed Irishness. However the product has no real links to Ireland and isn’t really sold in the country, only available in speciality ‘American stores’.
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