53 St. Patrick's Day Messages (Paddy, Not Patty)

First, the one-letter rule: Paddy, not Patty

Patrick shortens from Pádraig, the Irish form of the name, and Pádraig gives you Paddy. Patty comes from Patricia, a different name entirely, and in Ireland it mostly means the burger. This is the single most argued-over detail of the whole day, and it costs you nothing to get it right. If you are writing to someone Irish, or to an Irish-American who keeps score, the safe move is to write St. Patrick's Day out in full and let the nickname go. Nobody has ever been offended by the full name.

There is a second detail an Irish reader will clock. The shamrock has three leaves; it is the emblem on the card, the one St. Patrick is said to have used to explain the Trinity. The four-leaf clover is a different plant and a different charm, a luck token that belongs to no country in particular. Cards that mix the two up read the way a birthday card with the wrong age on it reads: the thought was there, the checking was not. Keep the shamrock at three.

The envelope is where the check happens. Read the name and the day aloud once before you seal anything. Most Patty errors are written in the first ten seconds, in the biggest letters on the card, by people who know better and were already thinking about the parade. Mine was in green marker an inch tall. Small writing is not the fix. Reading it once is.

For friends

A friend's card can carry the shared reference, and it should. The parade you both stand at, the green jumper one of you has owned since school, the friend who treats the 17th as a fixed point in the year. Name the plan or the history, not the holiday, and the line stops being a greeting and starts being a message.

One working rule for this bank: if the friend has a birthday anywhere near the 17th, the card has to say which occasion it is for, in words. People born on the 16th, 17th and 18th of March have spent their lives receiving joint cards that short-change both events, and they keep a private league table of who bothers to separate them.

• Happy St. Patrick's Day. Same plan as last year: I will lose you at the parade by noon and find you again by the chips.
• Seventeen years of friendship and you still own exactly one green jumper. Wear it proudly. It has earned it.
• Thinking of you today, mostly because March is when you start saying winter is basically over, and it never is.
• Hope today treats you well. You fed my cat for a week in February and I have not forgotten it, even if the cat has.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day to the person who taught me that a parade is just standing outdoors with better music.
• May your March be short and your spring come early. You have had enough weather for one year.
• Sending you this because the card in the shop had a cartoon leprechaun on it, and I respect you too much for that.
• Luck is not really your department, so here is the next best thing: a friend who shows up with food. See you Thursday.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day. I checked the forecast so you do not have to: coat weather, but the good kind.

For family

Family cards cross water in both directions in March: out to the ones who left, back from the ones who stayed. The lines that work name the kitchen, the phone call, the recipe on the fridge. A family card does not need luck in it. It needs the family in it.

• Mum, the soda bread recipe you wrote on the back of an envelope in 2016 is still on the fridge, and this year I am finally making it. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
• Thinking of you both today. Two suitcases in 1974, and somehow everything important made the crossing, including the kettle.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day, Dad. I will ring at six, and I will not ask you to explain the hurling rules again. Probably.
• For my sister, who cooks the full breakfast on the 17th wherever in the world she is living: the rest of us eat toast and think of you.
• Sending love to the whole table today, the ones sitting at it and the ones on the phone propped against the fruit bowl.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day to my favourite cousin. The family tree says fourth. The group chat says otherwise.
• Thinking of Grandad today, who used to say a short winter makes a long friend of spring. I still do not know what it means. Saying it anyway.
• To the aunt who sends a card every year without fail: this one is mine, on time for once, and the handwriting is legible.

For coworkers and clients

The office card has two traps. The first is drink jokes aimed at people whose lives you know almost nothing about. The second is a green theme pushed past the point where it reads as friendly. Stay with the calendar and the work and you are safe: everyone in an office understands a short week, a light inbox and a quarter that is nearly done.

Send the card on the day itself, not the week after. A St. Patrick's card arriving on the 24th reads as a diary entry; the day has no belated tradition to hide inside, the way a birthday does. Clients get the plainest version of all: the day acknowledged, the work thanked, nothing that would need explaining to their boss.

• Happy St. Patrick's Day. May your inbox be light and your meetings be few, today at least.
• Wishing you a good March 17, and a spring with fewer Mondays in it than the calendar strictly requires.
• Thanks for a strong start to the year. Hope today brings a bit of luck your way, the earned kind.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day from all of us in the office. The good biscuits are in the kitchen, which is as close to a pot of gold as this building gets.
• Hope the day is a good one. If anyone mentions a green shirt policy, it was not my idea.
• A short note to say the project landed because of the hours you put in during February. Luck had very little to do with it.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day. Wishing you a week with no surprises in it, of any colour.

Funny ones, said out loud first

Read each of these across an imaginary table before you use it. If it dies in the air, it dies in the card too. The jokes below aim at the weather, the parade, the pinch rule and the writer, which is where St. Patrick's Day humour holds up best. None of them needs the recipient to be drunk, Irish or either.

• I am wearing green today so nobody can pinch me. I am forty-one years old and this still feels like a genuine legal loophole.
• Happy St. Patrick's Day. I have decided to mark it the traditional way: talking about the weather for a full hour and meaning every word.
• May your troubles be as brief as an Irish summer. That is two days. I am wishing you two days of troubles.
• I looked for a four-leaf clover to put in this card and found none. Enclosed instead: my respect, which is rarer in this postcode.
• Somewhere a leprechaun is guarding a pot of gold. I am guarding the last slice of soda bread. We all protect what matters.
• This card cost more than the one I sent my own mother, and she has been informed. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
• Wishing you a day with no rain in it. Statistically ambitious, I know. It is March. In the day's honour: optimism.
• You are not Irish and I am not Irish, and yet here we both are in green, eating potatoes. The day claims who it wants.

For someone who is actually Irish

This is a different card. In Ireland the 17th is a public holiday, closer to a family day with a parade in it than to a costume party, and the stage-Irish kit (the hat, the green beer, the phrase nobody over there has ever said) reads as fancy dress worn to someone's actual house. Write to the person instead: home, the county, the weather doing four seasons before lunch, the people who will be at the table.

Distance changes the writing too. The emigrant writing home is not performing a country; they are missing a specific house. Name the house, the road, the person who will answer the door. A reader can tell within one line whether the card came from someone picturing a postcard or someone picturing their own street.

• Thinking of you at home today. Hope the parade stays dry, the dinner runs slow, and somebody else does the washing up.
• From three thousand miles away, the best I can send is this: I remembered, and I spelt it right.
• Hope the day is a quiet one in the best way. Family close, phone off, and the good cups out.
• Sending this across the Atlantic, to where the day is a holiday and not a costume. Enjoy it properly.
• To my friend in Cork, who has explained the rules of hurling to me four times: I retain nothing, but I think of you every March.
• May the year ahead be good to you and yours. The card is plain because I know the cartoon ones make you sigh.
• Thinking of the house on the hill today and everyone in it. Give the dog my regards. He is the only one who writes back.

For kids, and from them

Children's cards run on two engines: the pinch rule, which every schoolchild enforces like a statute, and the leprechaun who visits classrooms overnight and moves the tiny chairs. Write to those and you are speaking the language. Grown-ups sending to kids should keep it short and hideable. Half the fun is the finding. Cards from kids count double in March because the handwriting is the gift, and grandparents keep them for years after the crayon has faded to grey-green.

• Happy St. Patrick's Day. I hid this card somewhere green. If you are reading it, you found it. Well done, detective.
• You are officially unpinchable today. I checked the rules, green socks count, and you are safe.
• Hope a leprechaun visits your classroom tonight and tidies nothing at all. The tiny chairs upside down are the best part.
• For my grandson, six years old and already taller than the parade barriers: save me a spot at the front next year.
• Dear Teacher, thank you for the shamrock art. Mine had four leaves and you said it was lucky anyway. From room 4.

Short ones for a group card or a text

A group card gives you one line of space and an audience of everyone who signed before you. These are built to be complete at one line, to survive being read over a shoulder, and to still sound like a person wrote them rather than a pen that was running out. A text follows the same rule with less room, and the same line should never go to the whole contact list inside the same hour, because phones get compared over lunch.

• Happy St. Patrick's Day. Paddy, with two d's. You are welcome.
• Green on, worries off. Have a great 17th.
• Luck to you today, and the ordinary kind all year.
• One line, as instructed by the size of this box. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
• May your March turn out better than your February.
• Cheers to the 17th, and to you.
• Sending a bit of Ireland your way, postage paid.
• Good friends, good weather, good day. In that order of difficulty.
• Sláinte. It just means your health, and I mean it plainly.

Lines to leave out

Four shapes of line sink more St. Patrick's Day cards than everything else combined:

Happy St. Patty's Day!!! (in writing, to anyone Irish)

Top of the morning to you! (a film line. Nobody in Ireland says it, or has ever said it)

Kiss me, I'm Irish for the day! (in the office group card, above the signature of a colleague you barely know)

Let's get absolutely legless, it's basically the national sport (the drunk joke, sent to a client)

Two more traps sit behind the lines themselves. There is a well-known cocktail whose name jokes about a car bomb. In Ireland that name points at real bombs that killed real people, and naming it in a card for an Irish reader lands as a slur dressed as a toast. Leave it out entirely. And corned beef: it is a fine Irish-American tradition with a real history behind it, but it is not what Ireland eats, so do not present it to a reader in Dublin as the authentic article. They will be polite about it. They will also notice.

The friendly version of the same trap is the jokey salutation: 'To my favourite leprechaun', 'For the wee lass'. Written to an adult you respect, it shrinks them to the costume. If you would not put the equivalent on a Bastille Day card for a French colleague, the calendar does not license it here either.

Turn it into a group card

The 17th is a group occasion by design: the office card doing the rounds, the family one that has to cross an ocean and arrive before the day itself. A group card with room for every signer handles both without a sign-up sheet taped to a fridge. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, send one link to everyone, and let the far-flung cousins write their lines from whichever time zone they are standing in.

For the rest of the calendar, the holiday card messages bank covers the year's other set-piece days, and if your St. Patrick's gathering is half in the room and half on a screen, the notes on virtual celebrations are worth a look before you commit to a plan. Offices building the habit year-round will get more from the group greeting cards and work culture piece than from any single day's card.

The oxalis I bought for the day three Marches ago is still on the kitchen windowsill. It came from a petrol station counter in a plastic pot printed with a hat. The pot cracked within the year and went in the bin, but the plant folds its leaves shut every night at about nine and opens them again with the light, and it is now in a plain terracotta pot between the basil and a spider plant that has given up twice. I water it first now, before the others. I could not tell you when that started.