By: Tommy Druen
Guest Columnist
Every August, a man in the small Scottish town of South Queensferry gets covered head to toe in burrs. Yes, burrs, those prickly little nuisances that stick to your socks Thousands of them. His neighbors weave flowers into the mass, press a decorated staff into each of his hands, and parade him through town for seven miles and nine hours.
He stops at pubs along the way. This is Scotland, after all. Since his face is completely covered, he drinks the free whiskey offered him through a straw.
It has to be quite the sight. A man transformed into a walking garden with flowers blooming from his burr-encrusted body, shuffling through the streets while people press coins into his costume. This has happened for at least 400 years. And it’s widely believed that bad luck will fall upon South Queensferry if they ever stop.
Yet nobody can tell you why the tradition of the Burryman ever began. Not historians, not the residents of South Queensferry, not even the Burryman himself.
The original reason is just gone. Vanished completely. Maybe it warded off evil spirits. Maybe it was for good luck with the fishing boats. Nobody knows, yet everybody keeps doing it anyway.
When I first read about the Burryman, I thought it was a fun bit of quirky trivia. Then I realized we’re not that different. Our families do this. Our workplaces do this. Our churches do this. We keep rules and rituals we’ve never once asked the reason for, because somewhere along the way asking started to feel disrespectful.
Somebody, once, made a decision because the situation demanded it. It solved a real problem. Then the years went by, the reason faded, and the rule just… stayed. Eventually the only answer left is “because that’s how we’ve always done it.” And that might be the most dangerous sentence in the English language.
This doesn’t mean tradition is an enemy. Far from it. Family traditions hold us steady in a world that won’t slow down. Community traditions keep the stories that make a place what it is. The traditions handed down through faith carry wisdom. Traditions are real, and they matter.
But there’s a difference between honoring tradition and being held hostage by it. The moment we stop asking why is the moment tradition becomes a cage instead of a cathedral.
So it’s worth the occasional hard questions. Does this still solve the problem it was created for? If we were starting from nothing today, would we choose to do it this way?
Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it’s no. And sometimes, if we’re honest, the answer is: nobody actually remembers. That answer shouldn’t put us on the defensive. It should make us curious about what got lost along the way.
Here’s the catch, though. Changing an old way requires something that keeping it doesn’t. Risk. And most people, including me, will go to great lengths to avoid that. The familiar is comfortable precisely because it’s predictable. Changing means admitting you might get it wrong, in front of everyone who did it the old way before you. That’s not just uncomfortable. It’s lonely. It’s scary.
So we cling to the familiar the way a kid clutches a blanket in the dark. We do things the same way even when they’ve stopped working, just so it doesn’t get worse. Just to avoid the unknown.
Some traditions are great, while others aren’t. The problem is distinguishing between the two. Sometimes we’re preserving genuine wisdom. Sometimes we’re just trapped in someone else’s decision.
Some of what we’ve inherited is worth keeping. Some of it isn’t. The hard part is distinguishing between the two, trying to determine whether you’re preserving something wise or just carrying out someone else’s forgotten decision. Real honor means understanding why something started, not just that it did, and then deciding whether it still merits continuing.
The people of South Queensferry will probably never recover the meaning of the Burryman. That’s a loss, but a harmless one. Not every tradition is that innocent.
It’s not disrespectful to step back and ask: What are we actually preserving here? Why do we do it this way? And if the only answer is “because we’ve always done it”, if you’re defending something you can’t explain, maybe you’re not honoring anything at all. Maybe you’re just covered in burrs, waiting for someone to tell you it’s all right to take them off.
