WELCOME TO AN ENTERTAINMENT SITE FOR SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCERS!
Enjoy this curated selection of theme-related dances for celebrations and holidays, or find a dance associated with a special calendar day, or EVEN your own birthday!
Aug 3
August Monday
An August Day
Other Scottish Country Dances for this Day
Today's Musings, History & Folklore
"The Earth is the only dance hall where half the guests arrive dressed for summer and the other half for winter."
It's all in how you look at i!
While many of us in the Northern Hemisphere are dealing with hot, hot, hot temperatures and searching for a cool breeze between dances, our friends and families in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and parts of South America are enjoying the heart of winter.
Fortunately, this smooth 32-bar reel for 3 couples in a 4-couple set, devised by Sue McKinnell, works beautifully in either hemisphere—helping dancers shake off thoughts of the heat in summer or warm chilly muscles in winter.
It's an intriguing quirk of psychology that our brains quietly attach emotions and memories to the months. August might instantly bring to mind sunshine, holidays, gardens, and harvests for someone in Scotland or Canada. Yet for a dancer in New Zealand, August is more likely to evoke frosty mornings, woolly jumpers, steaming mugs of tea, and cozy evenings indoors.
That also means many poems, songs, and stories carry hidden Northern Hemisphere assumptions. References to "the warmth of August," "the freshness of spring in April," or "a bleak December" feel perfectly natural to many of us because they match our seasonal rhythm. South of the equator, however, those images are delightfully reversed. Christmas arrives in summer, Easter often falls amid autumn colours, and July is the time for winter scarves rather than picnics.
So wherever you're dancing today, whether you're seeking shade after a lively reel or warming your hands before the music begins, you're sharing the very same month with friends and family whose seasons are wonderfully—and beautifully—upside down. Good Scottish country dancing knows no season! 👯 🕺 💃 🧡 💛 💙 🔥 🌞 🧊 ❄️
An August Day
One of the most amusing quirks of living on a round planet is that the calendar stays the same while the seasons do not. We often instinctively associate December with snowflakes, roaring fireplaces, and steaming mugs of cocoa—but for millions of people in the Southern Hemisphere, December means sunburns, cricket on the beach, and the height of summer. Santa Claus may still arrive on Christmas Eve, but he's just as likely to be pictured in sunglasses, board shorts, or arriving on a surfboard instead of a sleigh.
The mismatch goes much deeper than holiday imagery. Our brains quietly link months with experiences we've had since childhood. Mention "August," and many people in Scotland, Canada, or the northern United States picture warm evenings, gardens, and holidays.
Yet in New Zealand, southern Australia, South Africa, and much of southern South America, August brings frosty mornings, bare trees, and winter woollies. The same page on the calendar evokes entirely different memories depending on which side of the equator you call home.This reversal creates some wonderfully upside-down traditions.
Australians might gather for a Christmas barbecue with prawns and watermelon while their northern friends are carving roast turkey after shoveling snow. Easter often arrives amid brilliant autumn foliage instead of spring blossoms.
School holidays, gardening calendars, sporting seasons, and even the best time to plant tomatoes all run in reverse.Many Southern Hemisphere cultures have happily embraced this seasonal reality rather than trying to imitate the North. Christmas cards feature kangaroos pulling Santa's sleigh across the Outback,
New Zealanders celebrate with pōhutukawa trees bursting into crimson bloom instead of holly, and beach cricket has become as iconic to an Australian Christmas as mince pies are to Britain.
Perhaps that's one of the loveliest things about sharing a planet. At any given moment, someone is building a snowman while someone else is building a sandcastle, someone is harvesting apples while someone else is planting them, and somewhere a Scottish country dance is warming chilly dancers in a New Zealand hall while another is helping dancers cool off after a sweltering evening in Scotland. The dance may be the same, but the season surrounding it couldn't be more different.
For a charming explanation of the seasons for children but with fun graphics, click the seasonal dancers.
Click the dance cribs or description below to link to a printable version of the dance!
