Of Ceilidhs and Haggis

I've been meaning to blog for a while and realized that I really needed to catch up since our last post was Christmas! Joey wrote this one since he is more of the expert on all things Scottish.

When we arrived back in Scotland in January we had no idea that January would be a month full of Scottish culture.  Joseph's school had already begun when we returned from our Christmas trip to the States and soon he was telling us that he was practicing for a ceilidh.  A ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) is a traditional Scottish dance that seems to us a like a cousin to a square dance.  After a couple of weeks of practice, Joseph's class as well as all of the other younger classes at Canongate invited the parents to attend the dance.



After the classes performed their dance, they invited some of the parents out to the floor to join in.  As Kate is the official photographer for all Sherrard family events, I got 'volunteered' to dance.  The pictures probably overstate the parents' dancing abilities.  Mostly there was a lot of standing around and clapping to the beat while the kids showed off their stuff. 

As you can see in the pictures, some of the kids wore tartans.  I was not yet the owner of my kilt when the event happened so I'm not wearing mine.

It was a great Canongate event.  Living in and learning about another culture is a great experience for the kids. 

The following weekend was the anniversary of Robert Burns' birthday - in many ways the high point of the Scottish cultural calendar.  Robert Burns is the national poet and bard of Scotland, and the country likes to make a big deal out of remembering him and celebrating his work.  This year Burns Night (Jan 25) fell on a Saturday, so after some planning and shopping the day of we got to work that evening preparing the meal.

The vegetable above is a neep - one part of the traditional Burns Night menu.  The neep appears to be some kind of relative to the turnip.  It's also known as a swede for any of you with an encyclopedic knowledge of vegetables.  The neep is prepared as a mash, kind of like mashed potatoes.  Mashed potatoes, known here as tatties, are actually another part of the Burns Night menu. 

The centerpiece of the Burns Night menu is the haggis.  We won't reveal to our gentle readers all of the ingredients in a haggis, but suffice it to say authentic haggis is illegal in the United States.  We also bought a vegetarian haggis, which has some of the more interesting ingredients left out. 

A little more about Robert Burns.  Even if you don't know who Robert Burns is, you're probably familiar with at least one of his tunes, Auld Lang Syne.  He put many of his songs to music, and they live on in Scottish culture.  In a formal Burns Supper, the meal opens with the traditional Selkirk Grace and will include many of his poems like "A Man's A Man," "Tae a Louse," "Tam o'Shanter," "Ae Fond Kiss," and more.  But they all include the famous "Address to a Haggis," which praises the manifold benefits of the dish. 

Here's the full Burns Supper meal.  The haggis was actually really good, but we probably won't add it to our weekly menu.  It was a great capstone to a great month back in Scotland.