Parent life / St. Patrick’s Day
The Leprechaun Trap Comes Home, and So Does the Night Shift
Kindergartens build leprechaun traps every March. Then the traps come home, and a grown-up has to stage an escape at eleven at night without waking anyone.
In March 2026, a reporter for 650 CKOM visited a kindergarten class at Prince Philip School in Saskatoon. Popsicle sticks and straws leaned against cardboard boxes like ladders, and the tables were covered in glitter and feathers. "They have been talking about the leprechaun literally since Feb. 15 once Valentine's Day was done," said the teacher, Makenzie Reddekopp.
Not every child wanted to catch it. One boy was building a hideout where the leprechaun could sleep, because he hoped to be its friend. Another child had designed a two-story trap with a bed upstairs and planned to lend the visitor a toy.
A trap with a guest room. That child is going to be a wonderful host, and possibly a poor hunter.
At the Cooper School in Charleston, kindergartners built traps in groups and left them in the backyard. When they came in on Tuesday, according to the school's newsletter, the traps had been disturbed. The leprechaun had investigated, left behind green beads and a limerick, and wriggled free.
A limerick. That raises the bar for every household in America. I had hoped coins would cover it.
Then the traps come home. A parent on Reddit described dismantling three of them on St. Patrick's Eve. The child, eight, had been building increasingly elaborate traps every year since a kindergarten teacher introduced the idea, and had saved last year's as the base for this year's. The parent's job was to make it look as if a leprechaun had come, escaped, and left coins and Lucky Charms.
You are trying to produce exactly the right amount of evidence that something did not happen. Too little and nobody came. Too much and something terrible happened.
The youngest built her first trap at home this year. It was a shoebox with a ramp, a bowl of Cheerios as bait and a sign that said, in green marker, "FREE SNAKS." At eleven at night I crept downstairs in socks. I tipped the ramp. I scattered three Cheerios. I put four quarters in the box. I stepped on a Lego and did not scream, which I count as my contribution to Irish folklore.
In the morning she examined the scene for a long time. Then she said the leprechaun had eaten only three Cheerios, which meant he was polite, and that next year she would add a bed.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Leprechaun traps? — a public parent’s account reddit.com
- Lucky As Leprechauns — The Cooper School thecooperschool.org
- Brittany Caffet — Catching a leprechaun: Tips from Prince Philip School kindergarteners ckom.com