Raisin Weekend

This weekend held the most weird and interesting of St Andrews traditions. I have briefly mentioned academic families to you all. Raisin Weekend is a celebration of these families.  The tradition goes as such: third and fourth year students 'adopt' Freshers and Study Abroad students (JSAs and JYAs), to be their 'children'. Their job is basically to help their children get acquainted with university life.


The festivities of Raisin Weekend start off with Raisin Sunday. In the afternoon, Academic mothers hold tea parties for their children. In days gone by there used to be mainly food at these parties, but now a days there's more drink than food. In the evening, the children are entertained by their dads' parties. Where lots more drink is provided. The parties can go on for a long time and almost everyone is at a party on that day.

The next morning (Raisin Monday) the mothers dress their children up in (usually funny) costumes and send them to collect their raisin receipts from their dads. The raisin receipt used to be a piece of parchment which acknowledged that the dad had received a pound of raisins as a thank you gift from their children in Latin. Now a days its written on almost anything. This receipt has to be carried to St Salvators Quad, where a huge foam fight takes place.  The kids get covered in shaving foam and everyone is completely unrecognisable.


My Raisin Weekend was fun. My mum's party was interesting, we had a lot of people there since it had hers and all four of her flatmates' kids. We played a few drinking games until everyone was too disorganised to play anything any more. Then there was just music and socialising. I went on to my dad's party in the evening and I had fun over there as well. Our hall was full of people having parties all over the place and it was noise and mess everywhere. I actually got to bed pretty early that night.

Monday Morning I woke up to go over to my mum's so she could dress me up. I was dressed up as a sheep and since one of our sisters wasn't able to come, my mum felt like her duck costume was going to go to waste and so I ended up having the head of a duck as well. A morphed sheep-duck is what I became. My other sister was dressed as a caterpillar. I went over to my dad's to collect my raisin receipt, but there was no answer when my sister and I knocked on his door. So we went to the foam fight without our receipt. That made me sad. Some of my friends had a tumble dryer as their receipt, some others had a pole with bottles attached to it, there was one who had a bust of Beethoven, and another who had a glove filled with canned food.

I made my way to the quad, and saw ton of people waiting outside with police keeping order all around. When I entered the quad with my sister, everyone was covered in foam. My sister and I locked arms and held our cans of shaving foam at the ready.  Within a minute of stepping inside, we were ambushed by two guys who covered us in foam. Then we went around spreading foam on anyone who didn't seem to be covered in enough. We saw our friends and covered them in foam as well. Then it was time to leave.

Exiting Sallies Quad on Raisin Monday

We exited the quad, had our mum take pictures of us and then made our way back to hall. I had to be careful to not dirty my room with foam while I was getting out of my foam covered clothing. That took some skill. I managed, and realised I was quite quite tired. So after lunch I took a nice long nap.


And that, was Raisin Weekend--the craziest of St Andrews traditions.


More pictures here.