The sound of the bagpipes and the smell of haggis filled the air at The Landing Restaurant on Thursday for the annual Burns Night celebration hosted by Rhod Sharp and his wife, Vicki Staveacre.
A tradition dating back to 1801, Burns suppers celebrate the life and poetry of Robert Burns, the prolific national poet of Scotland best known as the author of “Auld Lang Syne.”
“I want to share my heritage with the people who have been so generous to me,” said Sharp. “I’m grateful to Marblehead for taking us in. A lot of what’s happened to us couldn’t have happened, I think, without the help of people in town here. I want to give something back, so this event is an act of giving back.”
Sharp, a native of Perth, Scotland, was the longtime host of “Up All Night,” a BBC news and sports radio show that he broadcast from the attic of his Marblehead home.
While Burns Night is a celebration of the life of a poet, it is also a celebration of the cultural identity which Burns helped define.
Proceedings began just after 7 p.m. with the piping in of the haggis, a traditional Scottish dish consisting of chopped sheep’s liver and heart (and, formerly, sheep’s lungs before the USDA banned the consumption of all animal lungs in 1971) as well as onion, oats and pepper, all stuffed and cooked inside of the sheep’s stomach. This reporter tried the haggis and was pleasantly surprised by the dish’s almost sweet flavor.
After the haggis is paraded around the room to the din of bagpipes for revelers to gawk at, the ceremony reaches its climax with the recitation of Burns’ poem, “Address to a Haggis.”
After setting down his bagpipes, Jeremy Bell, an Edinburgh-born piper, recited the poem in the traditional Scots, a sister language to English spoken by over 1.5 million people across Scotland and Northern Ireland.
“You couldn’t do a Burns Night if you didn’t have a piper,” said Bell. “I’ll do six or seven of these this month alone, but this one is particularly good because the food is so good! And not just the haggis!”
However, Marblehead’s Burns supper is by no means the only one to be celebrated outside of Scotland.
“It doesn’t matter where you live,” says Staveacre. “You could be in Sydney, Australia, or you could be in Kansas. People of Scottish persuasion get together to celebrate Robert Burns’s birthday and enjoy his music, song, and poetry.”
