Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
January 30, 2005, Sunday THIRD EDITION
SECTION: GLOBE NORTHWEST; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 729 words

HEADLINE: PUT ON YOUR KILT AND PASS THE HAGGIS

BYLINE: By Lesley Bannatyne, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
How to pay homage to Scotland's best-loved poet? With a tribute made of equal parts song, Scotch, and, yes, a sheep's stomach.

"I put the haggis on a silver platter," says James Coull, 70, a Littleton real estate developer and first-generation Scots-American, describing his role in the recent Burns' Night Celebration Dinner for the British Officers' Club of New England in Boston.

"The [bag]piper pipes me around the room. The piper stops. I place it in front of the consul general. He recites the 'Address to a Haggis' from memory; he's brilliant. He stabs it with his dirk that's a Scottish knife, a long dagger. Then it goes back to the kitchen to be cut and served as appetizer."

And so it begins. The presentation of the haggis a dish traditionally made of organ meats, suet, onions, spices, and oatmeal, and boiled in a sheep's stomach is a highlight of any Burns Night, an annual celebration of the Jan. 25 birthday of Scotland's national bard. Born to farmers in 1759, the romantic, revolutionary and brilliant Robert Burns penned hundreds of songs and poems still popular today, including "Auld Lang Syne" and "A Red, Red Rose." He famously called the haggis "Great chieftain o' the pudding race!" in his "Address to a Haggis."

Although Coull guesses there are "less than a half-dozen" Scottish to more than 100 English officers in his club, Burns Night is a favorite for all, drawing 70 to 80 revelers.

"One Englishman for every 100 Scots is a proper ratio," jokes Scotsman Jeremy Bell, 37, who works as a professional after-dinner speaker on the subject of Scotch whiskey and will host two Burns Nights this year his own, and a private corporate party in Boston. "Americans just have to know one Scot to get invited to a Burns Night."

Burns Nights follow a formula: after the haggis ("All the meat we couldn't sell to the English," winks Bell), there's the "Immortal Memory" tribute to Burns, many toasts (whiskey, of course), recitations of poetry, songs, and speeches. Large public Burns celebrations do exist, often hosted by bagpipe or Scottish dance groups, but typically the gathering is more personal. Bell's, for example, is likely to unleash more songs by the poet than speeches about him. "More pipes, less drones," he quips. The 35 to 40 guests who come to the dinner at his Leominster home are ushered into the candlelit dining room by bagpipers, ceremoniously circle three times around the table, then sit. Good humor abounds: One year a friend, prior to the stabbing, hid a squeaky toy in the haggis. (Savenor's, by the way, appears to be the haggis supplier in these parts. For men who arrive in jeans, Bell supplies "rip-away" easy-on, easy-off Velcro kilts of tartan plaid. "Everyone wears a kilt," he warns.

A high point for Bell is the witty insult war that's standard at any Burns Night.

"In the 'Address to the Lassies,' the men start off ridiculing the ladies' eccentricities, but it always turns to them being endearing. Then the women slag the men off [in the retort, the 'Address to the Laddies'] and finish with why they love them. When do you ever go to a dinner when a woman gets up and addresses the men so kindly?"

This year Linda McJannet, 62, will do the slagging. A professor of English at Bentley College, McJannet is only a smidge Scots by birth, but has become a fan of Burns Nights through dancing with the Boston branch of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society.

"There's a wonderful sense of moving back in history to a different time," she said. "Burns Nights get everyone together in the dark of winter to celebrate the things song, poetry, dance that in an electronic age become more removed from real experience. People I know are playing the music, and I'm dancing, and it's all right there in the room." For expatriates like Bell, or for Coull, whose mother spoke Gaelic and sang Burns to him when he was a child, this night is close to the heart.

"I've been an expat all my life," says Bell. "Wherever expats gather, it's even more powerful. Americans have their Thanksgiving . . . but Americans do too much with family and too little with friends. If they only realized the beauty and wonder of friends and neighbors coming to your home, doing things you can't do in a restaurant, it's so much fun."

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