Our Family

Our Family

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

First Annual St. Patrick's Day

This year we celebrated our family's first annual St. Patrick's Day! I say that because I have always thought it was the dumbest holiday. But I decided to start some fun traditions this year and we had so much fun that I can't wait until next March 17th!

For Family Night we made a leprechaun trap. We bated it with real fool's gold and put a sign up that said "Do Not Climb Ladder." Those leprechauns don't like to follow rules. We told the kids the folklore about leprechauns. We found a cute video clip called Leprechaun's Gold on YouTube and the kids loved it. Here they are checking to see if we caught the leprechaun.But nope, just gold coins. Avri almost stuck her hand in the trap, but because of the video, they were nervous that the gold they found in the trap would turn into bees. hehe. Sadie was fearless and dug right in!
The Leprechaun's Gold was really magical gold that turns into chocolate and it is, in the words of Avri "the creamiest and most delicious chocolate you've ever tasted!"

But that little leprechaun didn't like that we tried to trap him, so he played a couple of tricks on us. He turned our milk green...
and our jello green...
and even our toilet water green!
We also tried, for the first time, Corned Beef and Cabbage for dinner. I was pretty sure it sounded gross, but it was actually quite good. I don't think I want it to be on my weekly or even monthly menu, but I think we will have it every year. The kids seemed to really like it and ate it all.

It just happened to be my week to teach preschool and we had preschool on St. Patrick's Day so we made Blarney Stones, and used potato stamps to paint clovers. We also discovered that pretzels make good clovers. We had green snacks and danced to a St. Patrick's Day song and read a book called "The Leprechaun's Gold" by Pamela Duncan Edwards. It was a good story, and the kids loved looking for 4-leafed clovers in the illustrations. It was a good way for the kids to see the difference between 3- and 4-leafed clovers.

Hope you had a good St. Patrick's Day! And if you have other fun traditions or pranks from your leprechauns leave a message! I need more ideas for next year!

3 comments:

Heather said...

So cute! What a great idea! I love it! I was with you... I thought it was dumb until all these cute little traditions started surfacing. I think I may just join you next year!

Allison Eggett Dietz said...

I wasn't sure what to do with my students for St. Patrick's day 3 years ago, so I created a fun little PowerPoint about St. Patrick's day. It has questions, and I tell my student there is no way they will know the answers, but it is still fun to guess! And every year for the past 3 years my students have loved it! But that's all we do to celebrate St. Patrick's day (besides me trying to resolve issues about who pinched who and if they get to punch them 10 times...lol). But anyways, when I researched St. Patrick's day 3 years ago, I found out that corned beef and cabbage isn't actually the traditional irish meal.

On St. Patrick’s Day, which falls during the Christian season of Lent, families would traditionally attend church in the morning and celebrate in the afternoon. Lenten prohibitions against the consumption of meat were waived and people would dance, drink, and feast – on the traditional meal of Irish bacon and cabbage.
Irish immigrants living on New York City’s Lower East Side substituted corned beef for their traditional Irish bacon to save money. They learned about the cheaper alternative from their Jewish neighbors.

Elise said...

I followed the link from Alli and Ammon's blog to check out your's and I love the idea of the leprechauns turning things green! How cute and it looks like your kids loved it. I am going to file this idea away for a few years from now. :-)