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Saturday Diary: Irish magic: It’s hopeless to resist the allure of leprechauns

Saturday Diary: Irish magic: It’s hopeless to resist the allure of leprechauns

I love public schools, not only because my mother taught kindergarten, but because of the free child care. For 180 days, they give parents a seven-hour pass. What’s not to love?

Leprechauns, that’s what.

Just as Hallmark foist Mother’s Day on us, elementary schools created a leprechaun infestation. (Google “kindergartners” and “leprechauns” and “traps” if you don’t believe me.)

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This is a departure from my own long-ago childhood, when St. Patrick’s Day was significant for only one thing: We wore green, lest we be pinched. That was it. The stores did not sell St. Paddy’s Day decorations or cards. There was no leprechaun activity, real or imagined. Most important, we expected no gifts.

The years passed, and I grew up and had children of my own. When St. Patrick’s Day approached, I found everyone green shirts and considered my business done. But no. A few years ago, my children went to school and came home babbling about leprechauns.

Little bearded men clad in green, they said, would be visiting their classrooms overnight and would create all sorts of mischief, so they had to make traps to catch them. But sometimes nice leprechauns would leave behind treats!

Processing this, I thought of the late sociologist Neil Postman, who wrote 1985’s ever relevant “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” A latter-day Orwellian, Mr. Postman rued the tendency of Americans reared on television to expect entertainment, not only at home on the couch, but in previously somber places like churches (what’s a sermon without a good laugh?) and airplanes (see Delta’s emergency-instruction video that contains — no joke — chicken legs dangling from a seat).

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So, of course, leprechauns spill paint and leave candy in schools these days. How do we teach children unless we hold their attention? And how do we hold their attention if they’re not entertained?

I get it. But must leprechauns invade my home, too?

At dinner, it began.

“The leprechauns are going to come tonight and leave us candy,” my youngest announced while picking at her spinach.

“Oh, really?” I raised my eyebrows and looked over at her siblings, who shrugged.

“Oh, yes,” she continued. “You leave your shoes out, and they put chocolate and gold coins in them. I learned all about it at school today.”

Possessing neither chocolate nor gold, I felt a small ripple of alarm.

“I think that’s only if you’re Irish,” I said. “We’ve never been visited by a leprechaun before. St. Patrick’s Day is not a gift-giving holiday.”

“Well, that’s just because we didn’t leave our shoes out before,” she said, reasonably. “Now we know.”

Later, when she was bathing, I looked in her room to find two — two! — pairs of shoes neatly arranged by the bed. Next to them were notes, adorned with shamrocks and hearts:

Welcome, leprcaun! Please give something to me!

I believe your real leprcaun!

My mom needs some gold! Please!

An emergency meeting ensued with the teens, after which we fanned out to look for chocolate and gold. We found nothing but six Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

The Committee to Exterminate All the Leprechauns convened again.

“I’m just going to tell her,” Katherine’s teen-aged sister announced.

“No!” I hissed. “You can’t do that! You’ll kill the Easter Bunny, too!”

Katherine was the last of my children who still believed in everything: Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, states’ rights, and now, against my wishes, leprechauns. She believed in pegacorns, too. (Cruelly left off the ark, they are unicorns that had to sprout wings to escape the flood.)

All of us did. There was no way, given my checking-account balance, to account for Christmas morning without a jolly old elf. Besides, we’d all heard the line “Everyone who doesn’t believe in Santa gets socks.”

We believe. Still.

But St. Patrick’s Day is different. It honors a long-dead man who ain’t even from around here. And as a fiscal conservative, I was not going to be badgered into a new entitlement program in my own house. My daughter was just going to have to be disappointed.

“Katherine,” I told her at bedtime, “no leprechaun is going to come. We’ve never had a leprechaun visit. Not in any house we’ve ever lived in. No leprechaun ever visited your brothers or sister. We are not Irish.”

She looked at me sympathetically.

“Oh, Mom,” she said. “You just gotta believe!”

I held firm. I have my principles. I closed the door and went to bed.

The next morning, like the Grinch, I listened for howls of despair. None came.

She emerged cheerfully, empty shoes and all.

“I think I had the wrong day,” she said. “The leprechauns come on the evening of March 17, not March 16. I’ll put my shoes out again tonight.”

Off she went to school, to inspect the leprechaun traps.

And off I went to the store to buy chocolate and gold, having learned that, after all this time, the public schools still have something to teach me, and that deeply held principles are no match for hope.

Jennifer Graham is a Post-Gazette associate editor and a member of the editorial board.

First Published: March 14, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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