MARCH 15, 2013 | BY JC MILLER

I took a trip backwards in time recently, courtesy of the Oakland Museum’s White Elephant Sale. There I found among the flotsam and jetsam a small smiling, perhaps smirking, terra cotta head that sparked memories of a long forgotten family holiday tradition. It was Sunny Jim, a figure synonymous with St. Patrick’s Day when I was a kid. For $1 I picked him up and began my journey—recreating a memory.

As I was growing up, January was a time when my Dad would retrieve Sunny Jim from the garage, fill him with water, and plaster his bald head with grass seed. Jim would then sit in the kitchen window and it was then my job to make sure he did not dry out—a big responsibility for an eight year old. At first it seemed like nothing was going to happen, but small green shoots would eventually appear, followed by fast growth that became a glorious unkempt mane of bright green hair. A day or so before the holiday Dad would get out scissors and set to work giving him a haircut. The result was usually a close cropped “flat top”. Newly shorn Sunny Jim would then take his place as the centerpiece on the dining room table, the centerpiece for St. Patrick’s Day dinner smiling over requisite corned beef and cabbage. He was the harbinger of spring and, from a kid’s point of view, the embodiment of all things Irish (a distinction that he shared with the leprechaun on the Lucky Charms cereal box).

Watching as the current incarnation of Sunny Jim sprouted I realized that he represented one of my first experiences with landscape stewardship and also an early connection in my mind between seasonal  change and ritual—ideas that are important to me today. Recollection of our long gone holiday tradition also brought up a range of thoughts on cultural identity and the importance of connection to heritage, but those can wait for another entry. In the meantime—Éirinn go Brách!