St Andrew's Day
The Saint's Day is usually a celebration of general Scottishness with traditional food, music (especially bagpipes) and dancing.
Saint Andrew was one of Jesus's original disciples, the brother of Simon Peter and a fisherman by trade, who lived in Bethsaida in Galilee (in present-day Israel.) He was originally a follower of St.John the Baptist until he was called to follow Jesus. After Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, Andrew traveled through out Greece and Asia, preaching as he went and making converts to the new Christian religion. Eventually he fell foul of the Roman authorities who were trying to stamp out the new religion, which refused to worship the Emperor as a god, and he was crucified on a diagonal cross in Patras in southern Greece and buried there.
The diagonal cross was adopted as the Scottish National flag, a white cross on a blue background.
The thistle is often seen during the celebrations. It is widely regarded as the emblem of Scotland. There are several varieties of thistle, most of them common weeds throughout the British Isles and nearly all characterised by extreme prickliness. The legend of how the thistle came to be adopted by the Scots tells of how a group of Scots were sleeping in a field when a group of marauding Vikings crept up to attack them. Fortunately for the Scots one of the Vikings stood on a thistle, whose prickles stuck in his foot and made him yell with pain, waking the sleeping men who were able to fight off their attackers. So, from that day, the story goes, the thistle has been adopted as Scotland's national emblem.
