Graphic St Patty's Tees: One Saint, Two Snakes, Seven Ways to Say Leave

It is September. The Halloween shirts have been out since August, pumpkin spice has fully arrived, and we would like to talk to you about March. This is not a scheduling error. St. Patrick's Day has a habit of showing up on a weekday morning when the only green thing you own is a lime, and we would rather warn you six months early than watch it happen again.

Graphic St Patty's tees have a spelling problem

Before anything else, the name. Somewhere in Ireland a person is reading the words "St Patty's" and quietly putting the kettle on to calm down. Their position is that the nickname comes from Padraig, it is spelled Paddy, and a patty is something you put on a grill. Their position is correct. Their position is also losing, badly, because most people who go looking for these shirts spell it with two t's, and we are nothing if not a customer-service operation.

We make shirts for both camps. One of ours says "St. Paddy's" right there in the design, so the purists have somewhere to stand. The rest of this post uses Patty, and we apologize to the kettle.

The spelling is the small problem. The big one is that most graphic St Patty's tees are built from the same four objects: a shamrock, a pot of gold, a rainbow, and a leprechaun who looks like he is about to sell you a timeshare. Stack all four on a green shirt and you have a very festive screensaver. Nobody has ever laughed at a screensaver.

Our fix was to put an actual person on the shirt and give him a job, which is how Skedaddle ended up with a stained-glass St. Patrick pointing two red snakes firmly toward the exit.

It is the one famous thing St. Patrick supposedly did that fits in a single drawing. The legend says he drove every snake out of Ireland. Scientists say there is no sign Ireland had any snakes to begin with, which means the most famous eviction in Irish history was served on tenants who never moved in. We find that more impressive, not less. Anybody can remove a snake. It takes real authority to remove a snake that was never there.

The drawing also does the one job a graphic tee has: it reads from across a pub. A saint, a pointing finger, two snakes, one word. The whole joke lands in about a second, which on the evening of March 17 is roughly all the attention anyone in the room has left.

Seven ways to tell a snake to leave

Then we did what we always do, which is refuse to stop. The same saint now evicts the same two snakes in seven different tones of voice:

• Scram. Brisk and efficient. A man with other parishes to get to.
• Skedaddle. The grandparent version. Firm, but you can tell he is a little fond of the snakes.
• Beat It. Pure 1980s energy from a man who predates the 1980s by about fifteen centuries.
• Take a Hike. Phrased as a suggestion. It is not a suggestion.
• Buzz Off. Snakes do not buzz. He knows that. He does not care.
• Away With Ye. The most historically plausible option, and the one most likely to be read out loud, badly, by whoever is wearing it.
• The seventh one. Two words, a little saltier, and not the one you wear to your nan's. It is in the shop if you want to find it.

People pick a favorite, and they are oddly specific about it. The one selling best so far is Skedaddle, which tells you something about the St. Patrick's Day shopper: they want the saint stern, but polite about it.

A graphic tee does not always need a picture

Here is the twist in our own argument. The other St. Patrick's design that keeps selling has no drawing on it at all.

That would be Irish I Had A Pint: green Celtic lettering, one sound-alike pun, and a wish that most people wearing it are about to grant themselves.

It still counts as a graphic tee, because the lettering is doing the illustrating. Those Celtic letterforms tell you the holiday before you have read a single word, so by the time your eyes reach "pint" the setup is already finished. It is the same one-second rule the saint follows, achieved with a font instead of a staff.

It also has siblings. Between them they wish the pub never closed, the glass was always full, the wearer had retired, and it was St. Paddy's every day, which is a fairly complete list of what people hope for on March 17. Not one of them wishes for anything responsible. That is the correct number of responsible wishes for this holiday.

Get your green sorted early

St. Patrick's Day usually lands on a weekday and always sneaks up on everyone, which is how grown adults end up at the office with a green highlighter clipped to their collar to avoid being pinched. There are more than forty designs in the St. Patrick's Day collection, saints, snakes, puns and potatoes included. Pick one now, put it in a drawer, and come March you will be the only person in the building who looks like they planned it.