St Patricks Day Gift Ideas That Are Not Novelty Hats

Nobody expects a St Patrick's Day gift, and that is worth saying at the top, because most guides pretend otherwise.

For the vast majority of people this is a day out rather than a day of exchanging things. The exception is specific and it is the reason this guide exists: people who are far from Ireland, or far from Irish family, for whom this particular day is when that distance is felt.

Why homesickness is the center of it

The day as most of the world celebrates it is a diaspora creation. EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum, traces parades to St Augustine in 1601, Boston in 1737 and New York in 1762. Ireland's first was Waterford in 1903, and Dublin held no official state celebration until 1931.

So the parades, the gatherings and the songs were built by people who had left, as a way of holding onto something. That is not incidental to the day, it is what the day is, and it explains why a St Patrick's Day gift means something to one particular person and almost nothing to everybody else.

For somebody living away from home

Food and drink from home is the reliable answer and it is not a lazy one. Tea, specifically, because everybody who has left has an opinion about it and cannot get the right one. Good butter. Barmbrack. Chocolate that is not the same chocolate abroad even when the wrapper is.

A box of things from home, assembled by somebody who knows which brands, is a genuinely excellent gift and it is one of the few cases where a hamper is not a cop-out.

Books work: Irish writing is not short of options, and something recent rather than the obvious classics tends to land better with somebody who has read the classics already.

For an Irish parent or grandparent

The gift here is usually not an object. It is a conversation, recorded or written down.

The thing people regret is not asking. Where exactly the house was, what the road was called, what happened to the neighbors, why they left in the year they left. A day that is explicitly about Irish identity is the natural excuse to ask, and almost nobody uses it that way.

If you want something to hold, a print or a map of the specific townland is the version of a gift that does not embarrass anybody.

What to skip

Anything that treats Irishness as a costume. The novelty hat, the plastic beard, the mug with a joke about drinking on it.

For the general population this is harmless. For the person this day actually means something to, it is the register of the whole day they already have mixed feelings about, and a gift that leans into it is not a gift, it is a joke at their expense wrapped up.

The same goes for anything green as its only design idea.

For children

A book of Irish myth, which is stranger and better than the versions that get watered down for children's television. The Táin, the Fianna, the Children of Lir.

Or a book about emigration, which is a subject children find interesting when it is about their own family and dull when it is not, so make it about their own family.

What I would not buy is anything that makes the day only about shamrocks and luck. There is more of this argument in St Patricks Day party ideas, which covers the day itself.

For a partner who is Irish and you are not

This is a common and slightly awkward case, because the risk is buying something that reads as an outsider's idea of their country.

The move that works is buying from Ireland rather than buying Irish-themed. A jumper from a specific mill. A book by a writer they mentioned. Something from the town they are from, which requires you to have found out which town, and that effort is the actual gift.

What does not work is the souvenir-shop version, which is designed for tourists and reads exactly that way to somebody who grew up there.

For a friend with no Irish connection at all

Then this is a day out and not a gift occasion, and you should not manufacture one.

If you want to mark it, mark it with a plan rather than an object. Tickets to something, an invitation to dinner, a bottle to open together. The day is fundamentally social, and the good version of a gift here is your company on it.

The card is doing most of the work

For this occasion more than most, the words are the gift and the object is the wrapping. Something that says I know today makes you think about home, and I am thinking about you.

What to write in a St Patricks Day card covers the wording, including the trap of writing a joke card to somebody feeling homesick.

Across an ocean

This is the whole shape of the occasion, so it is worth naming the practical problem. Anything posted between Ireland and North America takes long enough that you have to have thought about it in February, and most people think about it on 16 March.

We make personalized songs at Ditty City delivered as a digital card, so treat that as an interested party talking rather than neutral advice, and read is a personalized song a good gift for the case against. What to gift when you cannot be there has approaches that do not involve shipping, and the seasonal occasions hub covers the rest of the year.