Raisin Monday
On Monday, November 20th, I took part in an ancient St. Andrews tradition: Raisin Monday. For many years the custom has been for new undergraduates to take on academic parents, older students who are supposed to show them the ropes, as it were. Somehow this practice evolved into an elaborate ritual that plays out every November, involving a receipt written in Latin, humorous costumes, and a foam fight in the Quad.
In days of old, the story goes, each academic “child” was supposed to thank his academic father by presenting him with a pound of raisins. Eventually, the university decided to enforce this requirement. Academic fathers were to give their children “raisin receipts,” written of course in Latin, to prove that they had indeed been thanked. Each child was then to bring his receipt to the Quad on November 20th. Any student caught without his receipt was punished by the university.
These days, the pound of raisins is usually a bottle of wine, the university does not enforce the business about receipts, that the receipts themselves are typically large unwieldy objects, making it difficult to carry them to the Quad. I’m not sure when the tradition of foam fighting developed, nor the accompanying crazy costumes, but develop they did. Here I am dressed as a martyr from the Scottish Reformation:
It took a while to get all the foam out of my ears…
