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Burns Supper

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

Ariesna and I just got back from our local Burns Sup­per. For those of you not entirely up on your Scot­tish cul­ture, this meal is held in honor of Robert Burns. To quote the BBC:

The Burns Sup­per is an insti­tu­tion of Scot­tish life, a night to cel­e­brate the life and genius of the national Bard. Sup­pers can be every­thing from an infor­mal gath­er­ing of friends to a huge, for­mal din­ner full of pomp and circumstance.

The Burns Sup­per we attend is put on by our local scot­tish her­itage soci­ety, HAGGIS. It is a friendly gath­er­ing with bag­pipe music, danc­ing and much fel­low­ship¹. Some years are more for­mal than oth­ers, this year it was a bit more relaxed. Two of the toasts were given by mem­bers of Wylde Nept. One of those was the toast to the lassies and it was a lovely bit of poetry that he came up with. Poetry just filled with imagery, graphic imagery. If you’ve ever been to one of their per­for­mances or heard some of their record­ings; you’ll know exactly what sort of imagery. *wink, wink*² The deserts at the sup­per were quite good.

Wait a minute, why am I talk­ing about desert and not about the hag­gis? Well, I tried hag­gis the first year I attended the Burns Sup­per.… Now I tend go to the nearby Czech Vil­lage Restau­rant and enjoy a dif­fer­ent nationality’s spe­cial­ity cook­ing. Though I under­stand this year’s hag­gis was sup­posed to be good.… If you like that sort of thing. Any­hoo, myself and a few oth­ers who enjoy aspects of the Burns Sup­per other than the hag­gis headed to the Czech Vil­lage Restau­rant where we had a lovely meal. Then we hur­ried back to the Burns Sup­per, got a bit of the deserts (which as pre­vi­ously men­tioned were quite good) and lis­tened to the toasts (also pre­vi­ously men­tioned)³. Then there was much danc­ing and the raffle.

The raf­fle is one way HAGGIS raises funds for its var­i­ous good works (a schol­ar­ship, grants, etc…). Mem­bers of the soci­ety donate prizes and you buy raf­fle tick­ets for chances to win. They divvy the dona­tions into 3 tables of adult prizes and one just for the kids. The “A” table is where all the scotch goes and any other higher-end items. “B” table items are still nice, but usu­ally not as expen­sive as “A” and so on for “C”. Addi­tion­ally, there’s usu­ally one big prize of the night that doesn’t get put out on the “A” table until late in the evening. If you buy about $10 worth of tick­ets, odds are good that you’ll go home with some­thing though there’s no telling what it’ll be. This year & last, Ariesna & I have plunked down $20 for tick­ets. Last year, we struck out and didn’t go home with any­thing at all⁴. Then this year our tick­ets were on fire! We won:

• a tar­tan blanket
• a shot glass with the scot­tish lion on the side
• a stuffed ani­mal (a small dog hold­ing a heart which says “I Wuf You!”)

And those are only the prizes we kept for our­selves. We also ended up win­ning tonight’s big prize, a replica of Scot­tish Clay­more⁵! Since I already had one, we gave with to AWelkin and her hus­band, both of whom seemed quite inter­ested in it. We also had another “A” table win­ning ticket which we gave to our friends E&D. They picked them­selves up a bot­tle of scotch. Then the raf­fle got down to the final prize of the night, a boxed “christ­mas cake”. We also had the win­ning ticket for that and Ariesna tried to give it to AWelkin’s friends D&P but they didn’t want it. While Ariesna was doing that, one of the guys (George) from Wylde Nept and run up, claim­ing the prize. I’m not sure if Ariesna had noticed that but she went up and turned in the ticket. George ran the cake back over to Michelle, dropped to one knee and tried to give the cake to her. She resisted but he was being insis­tant; so I decided to come to her res­cue. I walked over and told him that she’s my wife and he can keep the cake. Every­body had a good chuckle and we left for home soon afterwards. :)

¹ Blath­er­ing on with your friends.
² Noth­ing too bla­tant, but very obivous.
³ Yes, I am ram­bling a bit but then I’ve been sit­ting near a loud­speaker play­ing scot­tish music for the past cou­ple of hours and my brain’s still shaken up a bit.
⁴ Ok, that’s not strickly true. Last year, our friend Greg was along for the sup­per. He had to leave sooner than we did and left us his tick­ets. We won a bot­tle of wine with his ticket and we’re still hold­ing onto it for him.
⁵ This is a two-handed sword about 5–6 feet long.

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