I’ve been celebrating St. Patrick’s Day for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, my mom served green-sprinkled donuts for breakfast, and in the evening, she dished up corned beef and cabbage on the table while my dad spun Irish jigs on the record player. One year my dad colored my freckles green with a magic marker before sending me off to grade school. By the end of the day all the kids had green freckles (and all the parents had a note from the principal saying no more green freckles permitted in school).
I’m only a little Irish, but enough to embrace the annual traditions that have made this day special for our family. I’m a spirited mix of DNA but Irish blood is the one heritage my husband and I have in common. So it is that we’ve continued the traditions begun in youth, even expanding them as we’ve celebrated with our own children.
Welcoming Friends
We’ve also expanded the number of people around our table. Unlike Christmas and Easter, St. Patrick’s Day is, for many families, a lesser known and less-celebrated holiday. Typically people don’t have plans, making it ideal for sharing with friends. We enjoy inviting young couples who are newer to our church to join us for dinner and in the process, ask them about their traditions growing up, encouraging them to be intentional about starting family traditions of their own.
Friends’ Traditions
Over the years several guests have enriched our celebration by bringing their own traditions to share. We’ve sung Irish hymns around the piano, cooked and tasted favorite recipes, looked at photographs from trips to the Emerald Isle, and heard tales from ancestors long gone.
One friend brought an artful display of St. Patrick’s Lorica, a prayer for protection:
Christ be with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ below me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the hearts of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of whomever speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
Another shared recipes for lamb stew, freckle bread, and sweet potato pound cake along with a rhyme we’ve since shared at the end of our meal:
There are good ships, and there are wood ships, the ships that sail the sea.
But the best ships are friendships, and may they always be.
Bittersweet Memories
Holidays aren’t always light celebrations. We’ve learned that hard things don’t stop for holidays. But none more so than when I was pregnant with our second child. 21 years ago, St. Patrick’s Day was to have been my anticipated due date. But 14 weeks into pregnancy, our pre-born baby’s heart stopped beating. Though we still had corned beef and cabbage on the 17th of March, it was hard to celebrate that year.
Over time, the grief of miscarriage has given way to gratitude. How I praise God that He aligned what would have been Griffin’s birthday with a day we always mark as special. The smell of corned beef roasting reminds me to remember. We pull out his small baby book with a single ultrasound picture and pages of journaled thoughts and prayers, and give thanks for the short time we had with him.
Since Griffin’s death, this day’s traditions and subtle celebration have reminded us of him, of God’s faithfulness to see us through trials, and of our increased longing for heaven.
St. Patrick’s Story
In addition to sharing our story of loss and healing, we also tell the story of the patron saint for whom the day is named. Born in Britain, Patrick was kidnapped into slavery in Ireland as a teenager. Six years later he escaped, but after returning home heard God calling him back to Ireland as an evangelist. He went, eager to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with his former captors. Once our children were old enough, we started asking one of them to read St. Patrick’s history as part of our time around the dinner table. Hearing their young voices reading the story of God’s faithfulness made the telling even more meaningful.
Wanting to make memories celebrating traditions as a family has motivated us to put a little effort into holidays like St. Patrick’s Day. Whether your last name is O’Malley or Goldstein, you can cook Irish food (I use the Pioneer Woman’s corned-beef recipe), listen to Irish music (the Getty’s Greengrass Sessions is a favorite), and learn about St. Patrick (Kevin DeYoung’s article about Patrick’s life is our annual go-to.) It’s not about getting it precisely authentic, but about making good memories with your children and strengthening traditions that point them to God.
Holidays can Be Holy Days
Friends arriving in green sweaters and humming Irish jigs have long made this day in March special. I’ve experienced the every-year-ness of traditions shaping my identity by linking me to where I came from. But even more important is a tradition’s ability to inform our knowledge of God. Noël Piper helpfully defines traditions as:
The things we do regularly that help us in our deepest being to know and love and want God, the things that help our lives to be infiltrated with God—those things are tradition. And then if there are children in our lives, to pass these God-focused activities to the next generation—that’s what tradition is for a Christian (Treasuring God in Our Traditions, 25).
God sovereignly guiding Patrick through kidnapping, and later calling him to take the good news of gospel liberation to the land of his captors—alongside His sustaining grace through our seasons of suffering—makes this holiday a holy day worth celebrating.