The New Year Quote by Len G. Murray

The line is a lawyerly piece of hyperbole that doubles as cultural lobbying: it argues for Robert Burns not by praising his verse, but by tallying the sheer volume of ritual devoted to him. Murray turns commemoration into evidence. If there is "not an hour" without a Burns Supper somewhere, then Burns isn’t merely a national poet; he’s an operating system for Scottishness, running continuously across time zones.

The specific intent is celebratory, but also quietly strategic. By stretching the date into "many days before it and after it", Murray acknowledges how traditions actually work: they spill. People schedule around work, flights, community halls, diaspora calendars. The supper becomes less an anniversary than a season, a movable feast that proves its own necessity.

The subtext is diaspora pride with a touch of defensiveness. Burns Suppers are famously portable: a script (haggis, toasts, poems), a convivial template that can be staged in Ottawa, Auckland, or Dubai. Murray’s global sweep nods to that migratory reality and turns it into a triumph. Scotland’s cultural capital doesn’t depend on political power; it travels in accents, food, and recitation.

Context matters, too: a mid-to-late 20th-century world where ethnic identity is increasingly performed through events rather than inherited through geography. A lawyer would appreciate that kind of ceremony-as-claim: repeated practice becomes precedent. The rhetorical trick is simple and effective - make the tradition sound inevitable, and it starts to feel like a fact of nature.