Burns Night. Tradition and what ceremony gives children.

What I find interesting about Burns Night as a clinician is its structure. It is one of the most elaborately ceremonial evenings in any secular calendar — every element has a prescribed form, every toast has an expected form, the reading of the Address to the Haggis is delivered with theatrical solemnity to a dish of minced sheep offal.

This sounds absurd when described plainly. And it is slightly absurd. That is partly the point. The ceremony contains its own self-awareness — Burns himself was an advocate for the ordinary person, suspicious of pomp, a farmer's son who wrote about mice and men with equal seriousness. The elaborate ceremony in his honour carries a certain irony that the participants understand and enjoy.

Children at a Burns Night — and I have seen several through the Vienna Scottish Society — react to this combination in a way that I find clinically interesting. They experience something that is at once solemn and funny, serious and slightly ridiculous. They see adults being completely invested in a ceremony that is, on its face, about a plate of offal. They understand something from this that is very hard to teach: that ceremony is real even when the object of the ceremony is not grand.