What to Write in a St. Patrick's Day Card (and Which Day You're Writing To)

The name is the first decision: Paddy

Patrick in Irish is Pádraig, and Paddy is its short form. Patty is short for Patricia, or it is something that goes in a burger bun. That is the whole rule, and it is the rule the internet's St. Patrick's Day pages break most often: one widely read card site runs 'St. Patty's Day' through an entire article of advice, which tells you how much of the advice was checked. On a card to a friend at a parade, the wrong spelling costs you a teasing text back. On a card to an Irish reader, it is the detail they will remember, because it announces that the card was written from outside the day looking in.

If you are unsure, write the name in full. 'St. Patrick's Day' spelled out is never wrong, never dated, and it dodges the argument entirely. Paddy is for when you know the reader well enough to know they use it themselves. The same care applies to any Irish you put in the card later: a word with its accent missing reads the same way as the name with the wrong letter. Sláinte loses its long a without the fada, the slanted mark over the a, and the reader who knows Irish sees the gap the way you would see your own name misspelled on an envelope.

Too broad: 'Happy St. Patty's Day to the best coworker on the floor!' On the card one Irish colleague has to read, that is twenty-three signatures agreeing with a spelling she would never use. Hers: 'Happy St. Patrick's Day. The floor is greener and considerably better run for having you on it.'

Three March 17ths share the date

The oldest version happens in Ireland, where the day is a public holiday and a saint's feast before it is anything else. It falls in the middle of Lent, and the tradition was that the fast paused for it: a day of Mass, a family dinner, a sprig of shamrock worn on a coat, and, in the older telling, the shamrock dropped into a last glass at night and drowned. For most of the twentieth century the pubs in Ireland were closed by law on March 17, which gives you the measure of the day as it was kept. It has parades now, and a festival week in Dublin, but the centre of it is still a family day at home.

The second version is the one the emigrants built. In the United States the day became a parade and a public statement: we are here, and there are a lot of us. Chicago has dyed its river green since 1962, when the plumbers' union borrowed the dye it used for tracing leaks and put a hundred pounds of it in the water, enough to keep the river green for a week. The food of this version is corned beef and cabbage, which is an Irish-American dish rather than an Irish one, and the register is noise, green clothing and reunion. The third version is the office one: a token day, a card doing the rounds, green worn under mild obligation, over by lunch. Nothing is wrong with any of the three. The card fails when it is addressed to one and written for another.

I once learned the difference by getting it wrong. In March 2022 my neighbour Caitlin, who is from Ireland and lives two doors down in Somerville, was flying home for the week, and I left her a card before she went: large, green, parade register, shamrock confetti inside the envelope, luck all over it. In April a card came back from her, posted from Ireland with the stamp still on it, and it described the day she had actually had. Mass with her mother. A roast. A paper badge her nephew had worn to the parade in town and refused to take off at the table. Rain starting at three, and the takeaway menus coming through the doormat by six. Four lines, and it corrected my card more thoroughly than any complaint could have. I still find the confetti from mine, in the drawer where the envelopes live, every time I reach for a stamp.

The greeting ladder, from safe to Irish

Most cards pick their greeting from a shelf of sayings without noticing the shelf is a ladder. At the bottom is the plain wish, safe everywhere. Above it sit the Irish forms, which are better cards when they are right and worse ones when they are copied carelessly, because the reader who knows the language can see the copying. And one famous line does not belong on the ladder at all: 'top o' the morning to you' is stage Irish, a music-hall and film phrase that people in Ireland do not say to each other, and putting it in a card marks the card as fancy dress. The blessings need the same care. A blessing suits a reader who keeps the feast; dropped on the parade card it reads as a costume change halfway down the page.

• Happy St. Patrick's Day. Short, spelled out in full, and welcome in every house on this list. This is the line that never needs a footnote.
• Happy St. Paddy's Day, and may the parade route stay dry until you are home. For the parade-day reader, with the one detail of their day you actually know.
• Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit. That is the day wished in Irish, to one person; it reads roughly as law AY-leh PAW-drig SUN-ah gwitch, and a card carries the pronunciation problem for you, which is half its charm.
• Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh. The same wish to more than one person, for the family card and the group card, where the plural ending is the part most copied versions get wrong.
• Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig dhuit: St. Patrick's Day blessings to you. The step up in register, for the reader whose day includes the feast and not just the festival.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day to the whole house. Dinner at yours next year is our standing claim, and this card is the receipt.
• Wishing you a good March 17, in whichever of its forms it reaches you. The honest opener for a reader whose version of the day you are not sure of.
• Sláinte, and a good day to you. The toast placed where a toast belongs, at the end of a card rather than doing the greeting's job at the start.

For the day as it is kept in Ireland

Cards to Ireland are read in a particular setting: a day off, family nearby or conspicuously not, the parade on the television rather than at the end of the street. What lands there is news and steadiness, not luck. The reader's Irish relations mostly do not need their own day explained to them, and the green jokes that fill the diaspora cards are the one thing to leave in the envelope. Write the card the way you would write to family on any feast day: who is well, who is missed, when you are coming. A small accuracy earns its keep here too. The shamrock has three leaves, and the plant on Irish cards is the shamrock; a four-leaf clover belongs to a separate plant entirely, and you will rarely see one in Irish decorations for the day, whatever the card shops abroad print.

• Thinking of the table at home today, and of everyone in their usual chairs: happy St. Patrick's Day. Save me the argument about the gravy.
• Wishing you a peaceful one. Mass, dinner, and the day off work doing what it was always for. We will call tonight when the house is quiet.
• For the cook of the roast and the keeper of the shamrock: a good feast day, and a year of being looked after half as well as you look after everyone else.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day from the far side of the water. The day here is loud and green and mostly an excuse; yours is the real one, and we know it.
• May the year treat your house gently. We think of you on this day more than any other, because it is the day the family is all in one place in our heads.
• To the keeper of the badge and the roast and the good chairs: happy St. Patrick's Day. The nephew has the right idea. The badge stays on.
• A quiet card for a quiet day. No luck wished, no leprechauns deployed. Just love from us, and a promise to be home for one of these properly.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day. If the rain holds off until after the parade, take it as the day behaving itself for once. Either way, we are thinking of you.

For the parade day

The diaspora card can carry everything the Ireland card cannot: the noise, the green, the jokes, the reunion. Its job is to be a roll call. Name the corner you stand on, the year count, the relative who organises it, the one who has moved away and gets the photograph. Drinking lines live here, if they live anywhere, and even here they follow the reader rather than the holiday: a joke about the third pint is a fine line to the friend who will be holding one and a poor line in the year that friend has stopped. The day is also the one day many families hear from their whole scattered cast at once, so a parade card often does double duty as the annual proof of life. Write it like one.

• Happy St. Paddy's Day. Same corner as last year, same argument about where to stand, and I would not change a single part of it.
• May your river be green, your route be dry and your corned beef be somebody else's cooking. See you at the corner by eleven.
• To the organiser of this operation: parade, lunch, home before the crowds turn. The family runs on your planning and always has.
• To my favourite almost-Irish person: happy St. Patrick's Day. Your claim rests on a great-grandmother and total commitment, and the commitment carries it.
• Another March 17, another year of you explaining the day to the rest of us. The explanation is the tradition now. Keep going.
• Wishing you the good kind of loud today: brass bands, old friends, green everywhere, and a seat on the train home.
• For the one who wears green like it is a team strip: happy St. Patrick's Day. Nobody on this street does the day better, and the street knows it.
• Luck is not the point of you, but have some anyway. Parade first, then the long lunch, then somebody else's washing up.

For the morning after, and the card that lands late

St. Patrick's Day has a second card window that the other festivals mostly lack: the day after, when the event is over and can be described. A card written on March 18 can do what no card written on March 10 can, which is report. What the weather did, who turned up, which photograph came out. It also forgives the late writer completely, provided the writer changes the card's job instead of apologising through it: a report is never late, it is just filed after the event. Mail to Ireland needs the same reframing. A card posted in the second week of March may well land after the day, and a line in it that expects that ('this will reach you when the shamrock has come off your coat') turns the postal delay into part of the design.

• Written on the 18th, about the 17th: a good day, well spent, and you at the centre of it. The card was always going to be a day late. So was I.
• The parade is done, the green is in the wash, and this is the quieter card to say the day suited you. Same time next year.
• Sorry this missed the day. In my defence, so did half the band. Thank you for the lunch, the corner and the lift home.
• A card for the morning after, when the photographs have arrived and everyone looks happier than they remember. You are in the best of them.
• Late, and meant. The seventeenth got the crowd; you get the considered version, which has better handwriting and fewer exclamation marks.

If you are writing as the leprechaun

One St. Patrick's card is written by an adult pretending to be somebody else. Across the United States, children build leprechaun traps out of shoeboxes and cereal boxes and set them out on the night of March 16, and in the morning there are chocolate coins, signs of a struggle, and, in the houses that do it properly, a note. The tradition is American; it is largely unknown in Ireland, which is worth knowing before you describe it to Irish grandparents. The note has rules. The leprechaun escaped, always: a caught leprechaun ends the tradition and raises questions about custody. He was impressed, specifically: he names the part of the trap that nearly worked. And he leaves something, because a visit with no evidence is just a rumour. I have written this note at eleven at night with a green gel pen for my niece Maggie, whose trap had a ramp, a door on a string and bait counted out in a row, and the hardest part was not the handwriting. It was remembering that the reader is seven, checks facts, and would absolutely measure the gap.

• Dear trap-builder. Your roof nearly had me, and the ramp was well judged. Nearly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Better luck next year. L.
• To the engineer of the box by the stairs: I came for the gold, I admired the workmanship, I left by the gap you will find if you measure. The coin is for the effort.
• A fine trap. A credit to the house. One improvement, offered in a professional spirit: leprechauns can count, and your sign said three coins where there were two.
• Caught the scent of the bait from the garden and the craftsmanship from the door. You were asleep by the time I had finished admiring it. Next year, build two.
• This note is to confirm that your trap was visited, inspected and respected, in that order. The gold was tempting. The architect was the problem. Sleep well. L.
• For the record: the ladder held my weight, the door did not, and a craftsman knows the difference. Chocolate where the gold was, and my compliments to the builder.

For the office card everyone signs

The office St. Patrick's card has a reader most signers forget: in any workplace with Irish staff, the card will be read closely by the person whose day it actually is, and she will read all twenty-four lines, including the ones dashed off by people thinking about lunch. That is the argument for keeping the office bank alcohol-free and stage-Irish-free as a matter of policy rather than taste: you do not know every reader's year, and the group card is the one document in the building that everybody named on it has endorsed. Write one true line about the person's work and let the signer list carry the warmth. Teams spread across sites do this better with a group card everyone can sign online than with a paper card touring three buildings, and the evidence for that is in what a shared card does to the culture of a workplace generally: people write more, and more carefully, when the card is not physically waiting on their desk.

• Happy St. Patrick's Day from the whole floor. The day is better for having you in the building, and so, unrelatedly, are the meetings.
• To our resident expert on the day itself: thank you for the corrections, the pronunciation help and the patience. The card is spelled correctly. We checked.
• Wishing you a good one from everyone who wore green under varying degrees of pressure. Solidarity, of a kind.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day. Lunch is on the team today, the agenda is mercifully short, and the green cake in the kitchen has your name on the good slice.
• From the floor: a good day to you, and a quiet inbox until at least ten. It is the least March can do.
• Signed by the whole team, in green ink where available: happy St. Patrick's Day, and thanks for the work that never makes it into the parade.

Short lines for tags and texts

For the gift tag, the group thread and the bottom of a card somebody else organised:

• Happy St. Patrick's Day. Spelled carefully, meant entirely.
• A good March 17 to you, in whichever form it reaches you.
• Sláinte, and love from this house to yours.
• Thinking of the table at home today. Save me a chair in spirit.
• Same corner next year. I will bring the flask of tea.
• Green worn, card sent, roll call complete. Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Lines to leave out

Five regulars, and the reason each one fails. 'Top o' the morning' fails as fancy dress: it is a stage phrase, and the Irish reader hears the theatre in it. The Patty spelling fails on accuracy, and it fails worst on the cards where the most people sign it. The four-leaf clover fails on botany: it is the wrong plant, and the shamrock's three leaves are the point of the symbol. The green-beer joke fails on readership, because a card is read by more people, in more years of their lives, than the signer pictured when they wrote it. And the plastic accent, the written 'ye' and 'yer' and begorrah, fails on respect: it writes the reader as a character in a play they did not audition for. None of this makes the day solemn. It makes the card addressed to a person rather than to a costume.

'Top o' the morning to ye, and may ye be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows ye're dead!'
'Happy St. Patty's Day!! Kiss me, I'm Irish-ish!'
A paragraph about pots of gold, addressed to a father-in-law in Ireland who takes the feast seriously.
A drinking joke, in the group card, the year a colleague has quietly stopped.
The four-leaf clover drawn large, on a card for a reader who wears the three-leaf kind on her coat.

March is a generous month for cards written properly. If your St. Patrick's card goes to a mother whose real day is in May, what to write in a Mother's Day card covers the version of this problem where the calendar, rather than the culture, does the trapping. For the card itself, a group card with room for everyone's line suits the office version of the day, colleagues in different places can sign a card that travels to them instead, and you can create a card online in a couple of minutes.

There is a tin whistle in the Christmas decorations box in this house. It was bought at a parade in 2019 by someone who had a plan, and it has lived in the wrong box ever since, so it surfaces every December, three months early for its one engagement of the year. Somebody picks it up, attempts the same tune, fails at the same place, and puts it back in the box with the baubles, where it will be found again next Christmas, still unlearned. Nobody has ever suggested moving it to a drawer. It would not be the same whistle in a drawer.