St. Patrick’s Day FHE

Since St. Patrick’s Day was on a Monday this year I was very interested in finding a way to incorporate the holiday into our Family Home Evening.  A couple years ago I had read an article someone posted on Facebook called Saint Patrick: Worthy to be Called a Saint that changed my perspective on St. Patrick’s Day completely.  I’d always thought that it was a day to celebrate leprechauns, wear green and eat corned beef.  It had never occurred to me that it was of course a religious holiday celebrating a Catholic saint.  I bet the real St. Patrick just rolls in his grave every year when Americans celebrate his life by perpetuating pagan superstitions (the exact thing he devoted his life to dispelling in Ireland) and getting drunk.  (On a total sidenote, I also read this article called The Dark History of Green Food on St. Patrick’s Day which taught me a little more about Irish history and helped me realize just how culturally insensitive some of our St. Patrick’s Day celebration is towards precisely the people we’re celebrating.)

Anyways, because I had read that article about St. Patrick I really wanted to find an FHE lesson that focused on him and what he’d done with his life, but I came up short.  Lots of lessons on rainbows and pots of gold… nothing about St. Patrick.  So I did the only logical thing and made my own lesson.

Fortunately my niece came to my rescue by reminding me of the Veggie Tales’ retelling of the story of St. Patrick – perfect.  It’s about 10 minutes long and is very engaging for little kids (who doesn’t love Veggie Tales?) and tells about who St. Patrick was and why we celebrate him.  So I started my lesson by showing that video clip.  If you have Amazon Prime you can stream it for free or if not you can rent it for $1.99 (at least that’s the price as I write this post), you can also buy the DVD – Sumo of the Opera if you’re the awesome plan-in-advance kind of person.  Or if you don’t want to show the video I included a brief synopsis in the lesson outline, but really VeggieTales does a much better job 🙂

Anyways, the lesson touches on several different topics – the Godhead, forgiving others and the importance of missionary work.  You can just use part of the lesson or talk about all of it together, whatever works best for you!  It’s a super simple lesson but I think it’s a good way to bring the focus of the holiday to what we really should be celebrating.

So here’s the lesson outline – St. Patrick’s Day FHE Outline

Hopefully your family enjoys this lesson as much as mine did!  Happy St. Patrick’s Day!