Burns Suppers: Kilt, Dancing & Murder Etiquette

Today Scots celebrate Burns Night, their most prominent and least violent national holiday. If you’re visiting Scotland or have Scottish ex-pat neighbors, you may be invited to a Burns Supper.

If that’s the case, it’s imperative you know proper kilt, dancing and murder etiquette. Pay attention, because kilts come with a little knife which the Scots tuck into their socks, and they might stab you if they feel so inclined. In Hawick (pronounced “Hoik”) stabbing constitutes a traditional form of greeting.

Robbie Burns is the all-time favorite Scottish poet, and January 25th is his birthday. “Auld Lang Syne” (that delightful ditty which no one worth partying with can remember the third verse of by the time midnight strikes on New Year’s Eve) is of his making.

The reason the words are so wonky is that it’s written in “Scots,” which is a sort of old-timey Lowlands dialect no one speaks or understands anymore. This is okay, though, as people from East Scotland generally find the West Coasters unintelligible anyway.

So Burns Suppers are a good opportunity for people of all dialects to come together and not understand what the hell anyone is talking about. They accomplish this by reciting incomprehensible poetry, eating haggis, and making clever speeches.

Burns Night isn’t the most notorious Scottish holiday; in fact it’s generally quite respectable. Hence all the men wear kilts. Below are the basics you’ll need to know:

If You Wear Underwear with a Kilt, It’s a Skirt– While in Scotland.

You cannot wear underwear and a kilt simultaneously without outing yourself as a cross-dresser. The singular exception to this rule is if you are participating in some kind of spontaneous ladder-climbing contest.

Since Scottish men-folk all grow up wearing kilts, they know how to perform tasks like walking up gusty staircases or stepping over air vents without mimicking Marilyn Monroe. And, since everyone in Scotland is more or less pickled from the age of sixteen and up, there’s a somewhat lax attitude towards accidentally seeing an occasional under-the-tartan wink.

Not so in America.

If you wear a kilt and sit on a bench with your legs wide open, you automatically get placed on a Sex Offender list and can’t walk within three miles of a school for the rest of your life. You might think, “Not a problem– I only visit elementary schools when I need to quickly sell surplus heroine or firearms.” Think again: driving to work without ever passing an elementary school would turn your daily commute into a complicated version of Pac-Man and severely reduce your fuel efficiency.

Thus outwith Scotland it is permissible to wear boxers underneath your kilt, but it’s customary to blatantly lie about it to everyone and loudly admonish any man who admits to doing so.

When to Wear a Kilt

Every single male in Scotland owns a kilt. They’re tricked out at weddings, Burns Suppers and (during Scotland’s one week of summer) while skydiving.

You should know, however, that if you wear a kilt in Scotland, and neither of your parents are actually from Scotland, you yourself are to a large extent wearing a costume. My Scottish friends interpreted my own enthusiastic adoption of the kilt as an embrace of their culture. Too many, however, the prospects of a foreigner wearing a kilt will be met with either tourist disdain or outright hostility.

I wore a kilt while walking to my going away party in 2008 and a young Scottish woman angrily screamed at me from across a meadow. (This is considered entirely normal behavior for young Scottish women.) It’s when I responded with an American accent that she decided to flip me off.

Don’t Scew up on Clans

The anonymous meadows caterwauler was only angry because I was a colonial. Imagine what might have happened if I had further entangled the episode by donning the tartan of a feuding clan.

Everyone in Britain enjoys brooding over multi-generational grudges. Football rioting serves as a kind of cultural relief valve for the otherwise overwhelming pressure of Brits and Europeans to kill one other, particularly as the Euro declines in value. But that doesn’t mean clan rivalries have disappeared. Far from it.

If you’re a foreigner and pick the wrong clan tartan based off of some asinine reason like emulating characters from Braveheart, either a McDougal or an Ogelvie or (God forbid) a Cambpell might pop out from behind a trashcan and jab you in the face with a broken beer bottle. (In Hawick this might well happen regardless of what you’re wearing. Particularly with Campbells. It’s best to avoid both the town and family.)

I chose Royal Stuart for my own kilt. Partly because my most immediate Scottish ancestors are Barbours, who clearly showed up to register their tartan after all the good manly ones consisting of lumberjack-style plaids were taken. When my ancestors finally dawdled over to the Kilt Administration Castle we got stuck with some horrid tartan combination of purple, orange and aluminum foil. It looks like the sort of color schematic Gene Roddenberry would pawn off of on a one-episode alien race in an early Star Trek episode. Blech.

Royal Stuart is both aesthetically pleasing and universally applicable: anyone is entitled to wear it. You can hail from Phobos and sport a name like Gomez Ngyun and you’re still authorized to don Royal Stuart. It’s open source tartan-wear. A sneaky sheep-thieving Campbell will probably still try and felch your wallet, but they’ll at least do it without malice since you’re wearing a neutral kilt. And if you’re dressed properly, you’ll have a knife tucked in your sock (a “sgian-dubh,” pronounced “skidoo”) which you can plunge into the offending pick-pocket’s stomach. They will then laugh bashfully for getting caught and buy you beer.

How to Pronounce “Ceilidh.”

Really fun Burns Suppers involve “ceilidhs” (pronounced “kaylees”), which are effectively Scottish barn dances. If you know barn dancing already you might actually be able to participate without maiming yourself or others. Otherwise you’ll mostly just careen into people and be a general nuisance.

Try to avoid any songs where the male dancers hold hands. Whenever six or seven grown men run in a line together holding hands it looks like a bunch of prison inmates just escaped a chain gang. From a distance, you might be mistaken as a Campbell.

Your best bet is to wait for a song called “Strip the Willow” and hide at the end of the dance line. As couples work their way down, spinning, you will have time to figure out the move when it’s your turn. Until then, whenever a young woman pivots your way, it is considered good form to fling her by the elbow in the air as hard as you possibly can, as if playing discus with a rag doll.

The Morning After

All Scottish festivities are celebrated by getting uproariously drunk and destroying private property.

Depending on how fun/volatile your Burns Supper was, the following morning when you wake up you might think you passed out at a crime scene. If you’re in Hawick, you probably did.

If there’s a lot of broken furniture and glass shards lying about, it’s considered good etiquette to summarily blame the damage on “the fookin’ English.” This let’s your hosts save face, and potentially exonerates you from paying damages later on.

You will probably have a hangover. Someone certainly will, anyway. Traditionally Scots assuage hangovers by drinking a liquid called “Irn Bru,” which tastes like liquified bubble gum and has literally been outlawed by the United States Food and Drug Administration as unfit for human consumption.

Canny Scots think ahead and load up their refrigerator with meat products, which are summarily fried and served.

Enjoy the heaping quantities of bacon, sausage and black pudding, locate what or whomever you put your knife into before passing out, and thank your host and hostess for a splendid evening.