In Atlantic City, ‘Bag Day’ trumps St. Patrick’s at Irish Pub

In most of Atlantic City, March 18 feels like any other offseason day at the Shore. The Boardwalk is chilly, windy, and sleepy. But take the stairs down to St. James Place and set foot inside the Irish Pub, Atlantic City’s round-the-clock Prohibition-era bar, and you’ll be immersed in arguably the most unusual, convivial post-St. Patrick’s Day celebration around.

But first, you’re going to need to put a bag on your head. (Don’t worry, they get passed out at the door.) This is Bag Day, a 30-some-year-old holiday for those who spend St. Patrick’s Day working.

By 10 a.m., the Irish Pub is packed wall-to-wall with patrons in various stages of sobriety, wearing bag hats of varying levels of creativity. There are basic brown-paper-bag hats with rolled-up rims: some plain, some lightly decorated with marker or stickers, and others heavily adorned with Mardi Gras beads and St Patrick’s Day dollar store buys. Some bag hats are affixed to baseball caps for more stability. Others are carefully crumpled and crimped into the shapes of actual hats (fedoras, top hats, bucket hats).

One eco-minded patron simply donned a reusable bag. There is even a woman with a whole bag over her head, with eye holes cut out to squint through.

Bag Day’s origin story is so frequently told that it’s almost myth. “Everybody has a different version,” Irish Pub owner Cathy Burke says, “but I was there.”

In Burke’s telling, she and some workers were sitting at the bar about 7 a.m. all those years ago, recovering from a long St. Patrick’s workday and night (the pub is open 24/7). They were lamenting that they didn’t get to partake when they decided to take action — and mark their own celebration by making hats from the paper bags they used for takeout six-packs.

“‘We’ll create our own holiday,’” Burke remembers them deciding. “‘From now on, March 18 will be known as Bag Day.’ Every time somebody wanted to come in, we handed them a bag. And we said, ‘No bag, no booze.’”

Three decades later, the bighearted energy of Bag Day now rivals that of St. Patrick’s Day proper: Bagpipers and drummers parade through the bar. Irish dancers make an appearance. Kelsey Grammer even bartended last year. Tourists and locals alike pour into neighboring casinos with elaborate bags on their heads, evangelizing the holiday further. Now, the folks it was created for — service-industry workers, doctors, and nurses, first responders — often take off just to celebrate.

Sharon and Mike Moretti nabbed a prime spot at the Irish Pub’s glossy, oval-shaped bar at 7:45 a.m. The Philadelphia couple started attending Bag Day in 2010, after they heard a rumor about its existence, and have missed only one since.

Before their first Bag Day, Sharon commissioned her late aunt to make Phanatic-themed hats from lime-green gift bags. They’ve been sporting the same hats every year. (This may or may not be a Bag Day violation, depending on whom you ask, though Burke says there are no Bag Day police.) Fourteen years on, they remain masterfully assembled. The glitter-painted nose made from a toilet paper roll is still bright, the neon green boa trim perfectly fluffy.

“It survived Hurricane Sandy,” Sharon says, showcasing her hat, which also wears a baseball cap. “The bags were in a trunk down in the basement, and the trunk was floating but nothing happened to the bags.”

Behind the Morettis, six more Bag Day veterans start lunching as the hour nears noon. Cumberland County residents Kevin and Tammi Langsdorf, Randy and Toni Duvilla, Marc Travaglione and Mary Boggi have been convening on Bag Day since 2018 — and for intrigue they’ve started choosing themes. Last year was Sesame Street, this year is Toy Story. The Langsdorfs’ hats depict Woody and Bo Peep; the DuVillas rep Buzz and the toy alien; Boggi, in a painstaking but rule-bending cardboard cowboy hat, is Jessie; and atop Travaglione’s head is a towering Mr. Potato Head smoking a cigarette.

“He’s laid-off and he’s disgruntled,” Travaglione shouted over the bagpipes. He spent about three weeks making his and Boggi’s hats, he said. They were spitballing ideas for next year over drinks.

“We’re thinking Charlie Brown … or SpongeBob,” Travaglione says. “That’s not happening,” declares Tammi Langsdorf.

Nearby, Irish Pub employee Brittany Nagle works the host stand in the bar’s gift shop, delivering bad news to one large group after another. “You’re welcome to stand by the bar and wait,” she advised again and again.

Nagle has been coming to the Irish Pub since she was a kid and working there for three years. She says crowds come in for Christmas — when Burke decks out every inch of the bar — but Bag Day is hands-down the busiest day of the year. “Today’s a holiday here,” she says, pushing her bag back on her head.

As Nagle keeps tabs on the growing wait-list, she rings up a T-shirt for Cynthia Soltis, who has lived just a half-hour away in Galloway for 38 years but has never been able to make it to Bag Day before retiring last year. “It was just not a day I would normally take off,” she says.

Soltis and her 81-year-old cousin had arrived around 11 a.m. “I’m not gonna start drinking way before noon,” she laughs.

Other patrons made the sacrifice of starting early in order to get a good seat. Craig and June Hetzel arrived at 9:30 a.m. and slipped into a booth by the bar. A bartender in a nearby casino told them about Bag Day a month ago, and they made plans to come down from Neptune, an hour up the coast.

June made her hat — veiled in green tulle, bedecked with four-leaf clovers, with a flashing green sequined bow-tie at the center — the night before. Craig overheard the arts and crafts project from upstairs. “I’m sleeping and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell’s going on down there,’” he says.

June wasn’t the only Bag Day virgin with a stunning design. The brim of Sue Doonan’s hat is actually a Christmas wreath (topped with a paper bag, of course) that she had transformed with four-leaf clover garland, light strands, and green feathers. Doonan and crew had traveled the two hours from Landing, N.J., to Atlantic City the day before so they could be at the bar bright and early.

Bag Day charms newcomers every year. On Monday, Burke spoke with first-timers from Maryland who told her they’d be making Bag Day an annual event.

“Life’s tough enough. It’s nice when you can just go out and enjoy yourself,” Burke said. “I said to all my friends today, ‘When you can walk around with a bag on your head and people look at you like it’s normal, you know you’re doing something right in life.’”