In The Bleak Midwinter: January Holidays

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Oh, nooooooo! I was so upset by Ol’ JoKe’s Imitation Inauguration yesterday that I clean forgot:

January 20 is St. Agnes Eve! I posted about this at length last 1/15, “Another Saint for our Saint”. So, today is St Agnes’ feast day: let me be the first, and I’m sure only, person to wish you joy of the day!

Before something else happens (and it will, as Ol’ JoKe continues his feeble inky demolition of Trump’s great edifice) let me remind you that January 25 is Robert Burns’ birthday.

Scotland’s bard! Our Rabbie! The eternal memory!

Did you know Abe Lincoln we a huge fan of Burns? He was! Last year we attended a Scotch-tasing dinner at the Union League of Philadelphia, in the Lincoln room. Ah those dear pre-pandemic days! But of course Lincoln is headed for the dung heap of woke history now, too.

(Okay now, as a Yank I hafta say that our own American troubadour, Stephen Foster, has Burns beat in the folk music department, in some ways. Burns didn’t write music, he set his poems to various folk tunes already floating around in Scotland. Foster did write his own music. Sadly nobody is allowed to even mention Foster today because he wrote sympathetically about Negroes: them whom we must now see as our empowered overlords. But Foster was a great poet and a great composer. )

How I miss the Burns Supper this year! The St.Andrews Society will of course be doing it online, but if you aren’t in the room with the pipes ‘n’ drums, surreptitiously ogling the gentlemen’s legs (and yes, Simon, our braw Scots laddie, we know your legs would show to advantage in a kilt!) well, you aren’t really living Burns Night!

I would host my own Burns Supper, cep’n the US Mail has become so capricious that I doubt I could order the haggis, “great chieftain o’ the pudding’ race”, as Burns hymned it, and be confident that it would arrive on time. I COULD get at least one sole bagpipe player, a local gent who operates as “Rent-a-Piper. Or at least I did, once, for a birthday party I threw for my brother. And in case you’ve ever wondered, one bagpiper is enough, nay, more than enough, if he’s playing in your living room. Some of my guests cowered in the kitchen!

So, today, spare a thought for or prayer to the virginal maiden St.Agnes, and on Jan 25 raise a glass to the eternal memory of Robert Burns.
We gotta have a little fun…

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9 thoughts on “In The Bleak Midwinter: January Holidays”

      1. We would celebrate Burns night just the two of us. Robin would have a few drinks and recite a few Burns poems, and we would listen to some set to music. I never heard of Burns until I met Robin. What I was missing!

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      2. And did you have haggis? I love it! When we were in Edinburgh two years ago we had it two, sometimes three times a day! You can order it from Scottish Gourmet.

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      3. We never had haggis, and unfortunately, neither of us ever heard of Scottish gourmet. Robin ate haggis when we were in Scotland, but never seemed that enthused about it: the thing he really missed was black pudding. I wish I had known about Scottish gourmet!

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    1. No pics, sorry. I’ve never hosted one, we always went to the St Andrews Society. But the menu usually iis haggis, which is s sort of loose sausage, I guess of mutton traditionally, mixed with oatmeal and highly seasoned, cooked in a sheep’s stomach. It really is delicious. That’s served with “neeps ‘n’ tatties”—turnips and mashed potatoes. But what they call turnips i call rutabaga, because it’s bright yellow, so not the same color as the potatoes, which our turnips here would be. I served it at Christmas and tried adding some color to the turnips with paprika. Don’t. My nephew said, “What’s the brown mush?”
      Then if you are really lucky you get cranachan for dessert, concoction of Oats, raspberries, cream, whiskey…paradise enow!

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