Meeting of the Parliament 06 January 2015
I wish everybody a happy new year. As others have said, winter festivals contribute to national and local economies, but they do a lot more than that, as they also contribute to our wellbeing. At this time of year in northern countries such as ours, the nights are long. The sun, when it appears, does not rise much above the horizon, many of the trees are bare and the plants have died back. It is apposite that mental health is being debated later this afternoon, because the depths of winter are often particularly hard for sufferers of conditions such as depression and seasonal affective disorder.
The social benefits of winter festivals were probably understood long before their economic opportunities. Many cultures over many millennia have celebrated festivals of light, bringing people together to celebrate a common culture. The druids and others celebrated the winter solstice, and it has been argued that, in the fourth century AD, Pope Julius I decreed that the birth of Christ be celebrated at this time, partly in order to prevent people from continuing to celebrate pagan festivals. In Scotland, of course, we have continued to celebrate the new year as a separate festival.
The Celts did not celebrate only the solstices and equinoxes; they also celebrated quarter days in four fire festivals. There was Samhain—the precursor of Hallowe’en—at the end of the October, which marked the start of the dark half of the year, and Beltane, at the beginning of May, which marked the beginning of the light half. In between those fell Lammas, around the end of July—which, interestingly, is around about the time when a number of the common ridings take place—and Imbolc, at the end of January. Imbolc is now celebrated in other parts of the Celtic world as St Brigid’s day. However, in Scotland, we have the good fortune that our national bard was born at the end of January, which gives us the opportunity to have more cultural celebrations at that time of year, and, as we all know, the Burns supper season stretches out throughout February.
Although Robert Burns spent time in Edinburgh and the Highlands, he lived and worked first in Ayrshire and then in Dumfriesshire, and it is the area that we know as Burns country that has the greatest potential to benefit from those celebrations. As Joan McAlpine noted—and as I have celebrated in previous debates—that potential for Dumfries, where Burns died and is buried at St Michael’s church, was recognised in 2011 by an enterprising group of people who launched the big Burns supper to coincide with the weekend of Burns night in 2012. That was only three years ago, which is extraordinary because it seems to have been on our calendar for a lot longer than that. The success of that very modern and eclectic celebration of the life of Robert Burns is demonstrated by its expansion after only three festivals from a weekend event to a nine-day event, which now involves 100 shows in 50 venues, and a Burns night carnival involving more than 2,000 people from Dumfries and Galloway.
This year the wonderful Spiegeltent will be in town again, hosting a variety of acts including comedy, cabaret and music from folk to heavy metal. It will also host the burlesque “Le Haggis” Burns supper, which Joan McAlpine mentioned and to which I referred in a debate on festivals last year. As I said then, I did not dare attend it, but many people must have done so, as it will be running for a week this year.
I know that many of the organisers of the festival were on the other side of the referendum debate to myself. That might mean that I will be less welcome at the events, but it makes no difference to my appreciation of the work that they put in to ensure the success of the festival and its increasing importance to the region. I hope that this year’s festival may help to heal divides, too.
Scotland is often depicted as a country where there are four seasons, all of which are rainy. That may be true, but our seasons are distinct in terms of the amount of daylight, and I think that thathatn be turned to our advantage by the promotion of seasonal festivals that celebrate that particular aspect of our northerly part of this globe.
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