The Story of Burns Night

Robert Burns (1759–1796) was a Scottish ploughman who wrote like an angel. He wrote in Scots, the language of his own people, about mice and lice and love and liberty, and in his short life — and his long afterlife — he became Scotland's national poet. "Auld Lang Syne" is his. So is "Tam o' Shanter," and the line that says a man's a man for a' that.

Five summers after he died, in 1801, a circle of his friends gathered at the cottage in Alloway where he'd been born. They ate haggis, drank whisky, read his poems out loud, and decided they should do it again. They did — moving the supper to his birthday, January 25 — and the world joined in. A Burns Supper keeps a liturgy of its own: the haggis is piped in and addressed with Burns's own "Address to a Haggis," its skin cut open with a theatrical dagger, and the evening rolls on through the Selkirk Grace, the toast to his Immortal Memory, songs and more poems, and ends with everybody standing, hands crossed, singing "Auld Lang Syne." Wherever Scots emigrated — and they emigrated everywhere — Burns Night went along, a small warm room of poetry and whisky set against the January dark.

In the Grove: a feast for a workingman's words. Light a candle for the poets, feed people well, read something aloud. Burns would have approved of every bit of it.