St. Patrick's Day Mystery

This morning's skit was, according to Madison, "The funniest one of the series, and probably the year."  Indeed, Daddy had been looking forward to the last few pages of this skit for some time, the resolution to one ongoing plot line involving and upcoming unwanted marriage.

It was a great morning, and an important one too - we were talking about Romans Road this morning with the kids, which seems only appropriate during this series.  It was a pretty solid morning from start to finish, followed by a volunteer meeting afterwards.

You can see Daddy amongst the crowd there, all dressed up and ready for St. Patrick's Day, because, lo!  Today was St. Patrick's Day!

We actually managed to tie that to the concept of "Romans," by the way.  Check this writing out that Daddy contributed to our latest issue of Parenting Matters:

     Some time ago, a Roman soldier named Calpurnius lived in Britain, and probably had no clue at all that his son would go on to become one of the most famous names in history.  This was especially true the day pirates landed in south Wales and kidnapped his boy, along with many others.  These wicked men sold him into slavery in Ireland, where he was imprisoned for six long years.  But it was there that his son had an encounter with God.  And soon after that, he was able to escape!

    The last place you’d expect him to go is right back to Ireland.  But Calpurnius’ son now had a mission.  It was one that Jesus told us many years before:  “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”  That included Ireland.  

    Romans 8:28 tells us that “All things work together for the good of those that love the Lord.”  Sometimes those very things are difficult for us to fully understand.  In this case, that included kidnapping and even slavery.  Like Joseph from the Bible, Calpurnius’ son had to endure a sentence that he didn’t deserve, a sentence that lasted for years.
     But also like Joseph, if he didn’t go through it, he wouldn’t have seen where God wanted him to go.  Yes, while enslaved there, this boy saw the Irish people, and knew they needed to hear about the love of Jesus.  As Romans 12:1 asks us, he took his everyday life, and gave it to God as an offering. 
     And because of that, to this very day, his amazing stories and accomplishments in Ireland are celebrated.  They’re celebrated especially on a day we’ll forever associate with this man’s name.
     Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

     We wore our green this morning, and afterwards, we were finally ready for our big St. Patrick's Day mystery!  It was a great, great time with the family, and everyone came dressed up in character:

Yesterday, we had found that green dress for Madison, and it was just perfect for her elegant heiress look of her character.  And Mommy looked amazing!

We actually found that rocker shirt yesterday with "IRISH" written on it, a lightning bold replacing the middle "I."  She ordered the wig, the glasses and even green glasses, and wore those Chun Li bracelets along with a lot of safety pins.  She was an Irish punk rocker if we ever saw one!

As you can see, we were seated here, eating our traditional Irish fare:  Mommy prepared a few items, and the grandparents got a whole lot of corn beef and cabbage and potatoes and Irish soda bread.  It was all really delicious, and some of us probably ate too much.  But there were plenty of leftovers for this week.

David actually brought some Irish cheese samples too, including Irish Whiskey Cheese and some Irish Cheddar.  His character was a Dairy King, so that was part of his deal.

But soon the mystery began to unfold.  Each person had cards, each card explaining motives and accusations and so forth, and everyone really got into character.  You can see Jonathan above, cracking everyone up as he does his best "boxer" voice.

Nana and Ye-Ye were having a great time too, watching all this unfold, and as characters themselves, attempting to figure out whodunnit.

Madison was hysterical!  She was in character, all elegant and refined, and simply appalled at all these lower class people making such frivolous accusations!  She threw in quite a bit of her own improv, adding to her story in a creative way that had us all laughing.  Ultimately, the clues were there, thrown down on the table as the game progressed, and you can see everyone working together to try and eliminate suspects, counting down to who the culprit really was.

In the end, it was Aunt Shain whodunnit!  One person in our group accurately guessed that, while the remaining people guessed it was Nana, or even Madison.  In fact, Madison herself thought that she did it, given such a strong motivation.  There was one bit of evidence that was overlooked that cleared her name.

Still, everyone seemed to have a great time today.  We had dessert afterwards, including a gluten-free chocolate cake with a big shamrock on top, plus Mommy's incredible marzipan potatoes, which look just like real potatoes!

It's become a day that's almost as big as Christmas, a chance in mid-March for all the family to get together, wear green, eat traditional foods, listen to Irish music, and laugh a lot.  We've done murder mysteries before on St. Patrick's Day, but Daddy always wanted to try one that had an Irish theme to it.  So... I wrote one myself.

Part of the reason it worked was everyone dressing up so well for it, and getting into character so much.  It wasn't perfect, but in retrospect, it wasn't that far off from one of these games that you'd buy in a box.  Usually the clues are vague enough that it is fairly difficult to predict whodunnit.  In this case, only one person did - Jonathan.  But everyone else had narrowed it down considerably, and they were close.  I learned a few things watching people's minds working on the clues, and of course there was some trickery involved too - Aunt Shain led a few people astray, accurately thinking that perhaps she was the culprit herself.  But all in all, hopefully everyone had a great time.   I know that Madison certainly did - she was talking about it all the way home.  And Mommy and I had a great time as well, as we always do each St. Patrick's Day.