The Little Book of Hogmanay E-Book

Bob Pegg

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 203

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Did You Know? - No one knows the origin of the word Hogmanay. - Until late in the twentieth century, Hogmanay was celebrated on two distinct dates, twelve days apart. - On the island of Islay, it was a Hogmanay custom to predict who you would marry by throwing fish at the wall. - There is more to Hogmanay than fireworks – firstfooting, Guisers, thiggers, mass ball games, clavies and the Dingwall Crate all feature within. Oh, and don't forget to look out for the Trows! The Little Book of Hogmanay is a feast of information exploring the history, folklore, tales, food, drink and traditions of Hogmanay, from its pagan roots to its celebratory present. Whether you need a user's guide or an anthology of entertainment, The Little Book of Hogmanay will tell you all you ever wanted to know about Scotland's most widely and wildly celebrated festival.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tocher, the Scots word for dowry, is the title of a journal published by the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, with selections of oral, manuscript and photographic material from the School of Scottish Studies Archive. I am indebted to the department for permission to reference or reproduce excerpts on the following pages of the book. The volume number and contributor’s name are given; a sound archive (SA) reference indicates the year these recordings were made. Especial thanks for help and advice to Archives Assistant Caroline Milligan.

here: Tocher 59, p.29, Graeme Mackinnon recorded by Emily Lyle SA1976.249.B1

here: Tocher 44, p.103, Dan Ralph recorded by Margaret Bennett and Gail Christey, SA1986.80A

here: Tocher 36-7, pp 358-361, conversation on New Year Guising in Lewis with Donald MacDonald, recorded by Alan Bruford SA1980.106

here: Tocher 12, p.138, divination custom from Islay. Maclagan mss, p.849

here: Tocher 8, pp 266-267, Annie Arnott, Skye, recorded by Calum Maclean, SA1953.10.A8; plus a note of a tradition about why the song was composed.

here: Tocher 16, pp 320-322, Peter Morrison, Grimsay, recorded by Donald A. MacDonald, SA1973.172.A3

here: Tocher 34, pp 252-255, Donald McColl, Applecross, recorded by Alan Bruford, SA1967.9.A1 and SA1975.57.A1

The poem Hogmanay (To a Pipe Tune) courtesy of the estate of Violet Jacob.

Manuscript account of the last shinty match on Iona, courtesy of the descendants of the Reverend Coll A. MacDonald.

Childhood song and anecdote from Hamish Imlach, from personal correspondence with Ewan McVicar.

Thanks for assistance to staff in the reference sections of Dingwall Library, Inverness Library and the National Library of Scotland; the British Newspaper Archive was also a useful online resource. Thanks also to Laura Smyth, librarian at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library for directing me to Anne G. Gilchrist’s article.

Thanks to my old friend John Hodkinson. Once again he has risen to the challenge, creating images whose resonance goes far beyond illustration.

My grateful thanks also to the following, for generously sharing stories, memories, wisdom, and a recipe: Mike Anderson, Elizabeth Brown, Zan Dunn, Arthur and Joan Dutch, Vonne Hammerstone, Janet MacInnes, Adam McNaughtan, Geordie McIntyre, Alison McMorland, Ewan McVicar, Jim Miller, Tom Muir, Lindsey Payne, Donald Smith, Sheila Stewart, Lawrence Tulloch, and Alec Williamson.

Finally much more than thanks must go to Mairi MacArthur. Without her scholarship, research skills and support, this book would simply not have come into existence.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Quest for Hogmanay

2. Yule

3. Hospitality

4. The Magical Moment

5. Fire and Frolics

6. Strange Visitors

7. Sport and Play

8. The Other World

9. A Guid New Year

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Today we agree to call the last day of the Scottish year ‘Hogmanay’, whose evening is celebrated in a very particular and distinctive way. Towards midnight, people with the will and the stamina gather together in homes, hotels, hostelries and halls; and outdoors in streets, parks, towns and cities – in the present case of Edinburgh in crowds of close to 100,000 individuals. There may be a ceilidh dance, a street concert – or, for those at home, a ‘TV special’. Then come ‘the Bells’ – the universal term for the moment of transition between the Old Year and the New – and members of crowds link arms to sing Auld Lang Syne, or at least the song’s first verse and chorus, then repeat the chorus with increasing rapidity until it becomes a wild chant. Drams may be taken, to top up the drink that has already been consumed, and New Year’s Day will be spent, by some at least, recovering from Hogmanay excess.

Hogmanay nowadays is a highlight of a holiday period which begins at Christmas and continues through as far as 4 January, depending on where the weekends fall, though shops and supermarkets are kept open most of the time. But, in many parts of Scotland, people in their sixties and beyond will tell you that, when they were children, New Year alone was the time for midwinter celebration – with widespread first-footing, baking and special meals – and that Christmas was hardly recognised. This is not surprising, first because Christmas only became an official public holiday in Scotland in 1958, and second because it was banned as a festival by the Reformed Church in 1560. Despite the defiance of individuals and communities, and the relative laxity of the clergy in some places, it never recovered the vitality it had before it was proscribed. The contemporary Scottish Christmas is essentially the Victorian version – with the tree, the cards and the wrapped presents – but, before the Reformation, Christmas was generally called Yule, which was also the name for a more extended period, a time of sometimes wild celebration which could last from several days before the feast of Christmas itself until well into January, when people would carouse, start fires, make special foods, and ramble the streets in disguise, to the alarm of more sober citizens.

After the banning of Christmas, many of the Yule customs connected to it were shifted into the New Year period, a time when seasonal celebrations were still relatively tolerated by the authorities. So, in Scotland, New Year became a melting pot for activities that had previously extended over a period of a couple of weeks or more, during which Hogmanay – Oidhche Challuinn in Gaelic – was just one pivotal point among a whole range of festivities.

In this book I want to look at the rich and varied ways in which Midwinter is still celebrated in Scotland, as well as going back in time to show what, in the past, was an enormous variety of activity, from Guising and New Year’s Day sports, to divination and flaming tar barrels. Many different voices can be heard. Some speak in open disapproval, condemning practices they see as heathen or Popish; others report without comment; and there are those who openly celebrate customs which are a part of the lives of their own communities. Clergymen, antiquarians, lexicographers, folklorists, travellers, journalists, storytellers, singers and songwriters: what fine talk they would make at a Hogmanay gathering – if only they could be gathered together – exchanging old tales and personal reminiscences; and occasionally, to add spice to the rich black bun of conversation, disputing among themselves, as Presbyterian strictness at the one extreme wrangled with hedonistic devil-may-care at the other.

1

THE QUEST FOR HOGMANAY

Hogmana, hoguemennay, hagmenay, hug-me-nay, huigmanay, hagmonick, hangmanay, huggeranohni, hog ma nae; these are some of the configurations used over the past 450 years for that mysterious word we now agree to spell as ‘Hogmanay’. But where does it come from, and what does it mean, with its embodiment of the spirit of the Caledonian New Year’s Eve, when the Scots celebrate with whisky, music, dancing and good cheer, and the rest of the world is very welcome to join in, if it pleases?

Over the last couple of centuries, the origins and meaning of Hogmanay have been discussed at length, but never rooted out. There are just too many possibilities to choose from. With its variety of spellings, the word begins to crop up relatively frequently in the seventeenth century. During the following century, it was scrutinised by a growing body of antiquarians, and John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, which was published in two volumes in 1808 and 1809 – the dictionary itself a great feat of antiquarian scholarship – gives the meaning of ‘Hogmanay’ or ‘Hogmenay’ as ‘the name appropriated by the vulgar to the last day of the year’. Jamieson adds that, in Northumberland, the month of December is called ‘Hagmana’, quotes from a late seventeenth-century account of ‘plebeians in the South of Scotland’ going about ‘from door to door on New-year’s Eve, crying Hagmane’, and gives a further meaning as a New Year’s Eve gift or entertainment. Jamieson then goes on to suggest possible origins of the word, from the Scandinavian ‘Hoggu-not’ or ‘Hogenaf’ – a Yule Eve night of animal slaughter – to the French ‘Au gui menez’, translated as ‘to the mistletoe’, a cry uttered in the sixteenth century by participants in the Fête de Fous (or Feast of Fools), a midwinter period of license and satirical mockery. Jamieson quotes from an article published in the Caledonian Mercury on 2 January 1792, which says that:

… many complaints were made to the Gallic Synods, of great excesses which were committed on the last night of the year, and on the first of January, during the Fête de Fous, by companies of both sexes, dressed in fantastic habits, who run about with their Christmas Boxes, called Tire Lire, begging for the lady in the straw, both money and wassels. These beggars were called Bachelettes, Guisards; and their chief Rollet Follet. They came into the churches, during the service of the vigils, and disturbed the devotions by their cries of Au gui menez, Rollet Follet, Au gui menez, tiri liri, mainte du blanc et point du bis …

The derivations that Jamieson suggests are still offered today when the origins of the meaning of Hogmanay are discussed, and no scholar during the two centuries since his time has come up with a more plausible alternative; though a charming suggestion was made by John MacTaggart in The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopaedia (1824). MacTaggart, from Kirkcudbrightshire, a farmer’s son, only in his mid-twenties and largely self-educated, cheekily comments on John Jamieson’s labours:

HOG-MA-NAY, or HUG-ME-NAY – The last day of the year. Dr. Jamieson, with a research that would have frightened even a Murray or a Scalinger to engage in, has at last owned, like a worthy honest man as he is, that the origin of this term is quite uncertain; and so should I say also, did I not like to be throwing out a hint now and then on various things, even suppose I be laughed at for doing so.

Then here I give, like myself, whom am a being of small scholarcraft, a few hindish speculations respecting this mystic phrase; to be plain, I think hog-ma-nay means hug-me-now – Hawse and ney, the old nurse term, meaning, ‘kiss me, and I’m pleased,’ runs somewhat near it: ney or nay may be a variation that time has made on now. Kissing, long ago, was a thing much more common than at present. People, in the days gone by, saluted [each] other in churches, according to Scripture, with holy kisses; and this smacking system was only laid aside when priests began to see that it was not holiness alone prompted their congregations to hold up their gabs to one another like Amous dishes as Burns says …

At weddings too, what a kissing there was; and even to this day, at these occasions much of it goes on: and on the happy nights of hog-ma-nay, the kissing trade is extremely brisk, particularly in Auld Reekie [Edinburgh]; then the lasses must kiss with all the stranger lads they meet …

From such causes, methinks, hog-ma-nay has started. The hugging day the time to hug-me-now.

Perhaps in a similar spirit of mischief, Professor Ted Cowan, in an article in The Scotsman in 2005, proposes ‘houghmagandie’ – coolly defined in The Concise Scots Dictionary as ‘fornication’ – as at least a close relation, given the amount of kissing and general emotional warmth that the season generates.

Whatever the truth about the origins of Hogmanay – and what a splendid word it is, whatever its derivation – the links to the French Fête de Fous may be real enough, given the cultural closeness of France and Scotland during the Auld Alliance (1295–1560). Before the Reformation in Scotland, the Christmas – or Yule – period lasted from Christmas Eve or before until Twelfth Night and beyond. As in France and elsewhere, what in some parts of Scotland came to be called the Daft Days was a time when less inhibited folk would don disguises, cross-dress, and roam the streets singing, playing music, larking about, and generally making a racket.

In 1651 Oliver Cromwell, who was then occupying Edinburgh, had the English Parliament ban Christmas. In Scotland, however, the Reformed Church, on the look-out for anything that smacked of Catholic ‘superstition’, had already abolished all feast and saints’ days in their First Book of Discipline of 1560 on the grounds that they had no scriptural authority. This didn’t, however, stop folk celebrating Midwinter in ways which had nothing to do with Christianity of any stripe. On 30 December 1598, Elgin Kirk Session records:

George Kay accusit of dancing and guysing in the night on Monday last. He confesses he had his sister’s coat upon him and the rest that were with him had claythis dammaskit about thame and their faces blackit, and they had a lad play upon banis [bones] and bells with them. Arche Hay had a faise [mask] about his loynes and a kerche about his face. Ordained to make repentance two Sundays bairfut and bairleggit.

The following year:

Anent the Chanonrie Kirk. All prophane pastime inhibited to be usit be any persones ather within the burgh or college and speciallie futballing through the toun, snaw balling, singing of carrellis or uther prophane sangis, guysing, pyping, violing, and dansing and speciallie all thir above spect. forbidden in the Chanonrie Kirk or Kirk yard thairoff (except football). All women and lassis forbiddin to haunt or resort thair under the paynis of publict repentans, at the leist during this tyme quhilk is superstitiouslie keipitt fra the xxv day of December to the last day of Januar nixt thairefter.

Cross-dressing and disguise, street games, music, singing and dancing in the streets after dark are all aspects of the Scottish midwinter celebrations that the Church failed to suppress. Many of them have kept going, or, have faded out and then been revived, into the present day. But although the festivities of the Yule period did continue in some areas, the effect of banning Christmas and its associated customs and pastimes was to shift many of these activities to the New Year.

A switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 put New Year back eleven, and then twelve days. Many people felt aggrieved that they had been robbed of these days, and some communities continued to celebrate Christmas and New Year in the Old Style, eleven or twelve days later than their modernised neighbours. In 1883, Constance Gordon Cumming writes:

There is a further division of the winter festivals by the partial adoption of New Style in reckoning. Thus, just as one half of the people keep Hallowe-en on the last night of October and the others observe the 11th of November, so with the New Year. This is especially remarkable on the Inverness-shire and Ross-shire coasts, which face one another on either side of the Beauly Firth. Long before sunrise on the first of January, the Inverness hills are crowned with bonfires and, when they burn low, the lads and lassies dance round them and trample out the dying embers. The opposite coast shows no such fires till the morning of the New Year Old Style, when it likewise awakens before daylight to greet the rising sun.

The Ross-shire Journal for 4 January 1878 describes the success of local businessmen in persuading the citizens of Alness to observe calendrical changes made over 100 years previously:

Yesterday was observed by all as the New Year holiday. Even conservative Bridgend went heartily in for it. Mr MacKenzie, ironmonger, and Mr Munro, merchant, had visited every house in the town last week and explained to the people the absurdity of observing the 12th of January. All pledged themselves to holding the 1st and it happened as promised.

But the following year, on 8 January 1879, The Ross-shire published a mild reproof to those folk in Tain who were still holding on to the old ways:

A great many of the older people in Tain cling to the Old Style, holding a holiday on the 13th January, as this year the 12th fell on the Sabbath … We do hope that this is the last occasion when it will have to be chronicled that New Year rejoicings were held at Tain twelve days behind the proper time.

For 900 years or so, until well into the nineteenth century, Gaelic was the everyday language of most people living north of the Highland line, and is still spoken widely in Skye and the Western Isles. Until this area was infiltrated linguistically by Scots and English, the word ‘Hogmanay’ wasn’t used there at all for New Year’s Eve. In Gaelic the New Year is a’Challuinn, New Year’s Day Calluinn, and New Year’s Eve Oidhche Challuinn (literally ‘the night of New Year’s Day’).

The Ross-shire Journal again, in 1910, gives a brief but lively summary, this time without any reproach, of the New Year’s Day activities in Gaelic-speaking Poolewe, in Wester Ross:

A’Challuinn. Thursday was observed as New Year’s Day (Old Style) in most parts of the wide parish of Gairloch. The day was spent in the traditional fashion in visiting and greeting friends, Fingalian feasting, singing Gaelic songs and games of shinty. All the schools and places of business were closed. The children on the previous day, as usual, went their rounds with their bags and camans [shinty sticks] singing their ‘Calluinn duans’ [New Year poems or chants].

Later in these pages, Alec Williamson describes how, well into the twentieth century, the community in Easter Ross in which he was brought up was divided between the people of Edderton village who were members of the Church of Scotland and who celebrated Hogmanay on 31 December, and the people on the surrounding hill crofts who were Free Church members, and kept Old New Year’s Eve on 11 January.

In Scotland, until not much over 100 years ago, New Year’s Eve – Hogmanay, Oidhche Challuinn – was just the one day, though a very important day, in a whole seasonal cluster of custom and celebration. In a few places this season could extend from before Christmas (whether Old or New Style) until late January. More generally, though, celebrations were packed into a shorter period, and in those parts of Scotland where the proscription of Christmas had been particularly effective, it was not a special time, until recently. Shops would be open, and father would go to work, though he might come home early to enjoy a special meal. As noted above, Christmas Day wasn’t a public holiday in Scotland until 1958, with Boxing Day following in 1974. Since then the modern, or rather Victorian, version of Christmas has pretty much universally taken hold.

People living today will also tell you that Hogmanay is not what it used to be, and this is true enough. The baking and the first-footing, which were widespread in the recent past, have been largely supplanted by an evening in front of the television, with drink taken long before the midnight Bells; while the young people who formerly might have gone round visiting are now drawn to celebrations organised for them on a mass scale. But reports of the decline of New Year customs, and complaints that Hogmanay isn’t what it was, go back well into the nineteenth century. Here is the beginning of a piece – set in the central Highlands – from The Celtic Magazine, published in 1875 under the pen name of ‘Knockfin’:

NEW YEAR IN THE OLD STYLE IN THE HIGHLANDS Old Mr Chisholm sat at his parlour fire after a hearty New Year dinner. His wife occupied the cosy arm-chair in the opposite corner; and gathered round them were a bevy of merry grand-children, enjoying New Year as only children can. Their parents were absent at the moment, and the family group was completed by a son and daughter of the old couple.

Mr Chisholm was in a meditative mood, looking into the bright blazing fire.

‘Well,’ he observed at last with an air of regret, ‘the New Year is not observed as it was when we were children, wife. It’s dying out, dying out greatly. When these children are as old as we are there will be no trace of a Christmas or a New Year holiday. What did you say you had been doing all day Bill?’ he asked, turning to his son.

‘Shooting,’ said Bill, ‘and deuced cold I was. Catch me trying for the silver medal and other prizes another New Year’s Day.’

‘Shooting may be interesting,’ said Mr Chisholm, ‘but as you say it is cold work. We had sometimes a shot at a raffle in my young days, but usually we had more exciting business. Shinty my boy, shinty was our great game,’ and Mr Chisholm looked as if he greatly pitied the degeneracy of the latter days.

‘I have played shinty myself,’ said Bill, ‘and I see it is still played in Badenoch and Strathglass, and among wild Highlanders in Edinburgh. But it’s too hard on the lungs for me, and besides we never play it here.’

‘The more’s the pity, Bill. There’s no game ever I saw I could compare to shinty. Talk about cricket, that’s nothing to it. Shinty was suited to a New Year’s Day; it kept the spirits up and the body warm. I should like to have a turn at it yet; wouldn’t I run?’

And the old man’s heavy frame shook as he chuckled at the idea.

‘However, there’s no use speaking; is tea ready wife?’

‘No, and it won’t be for half-an-hour yet, perhaps longer,’ said Mrs Chisholm. ‘You know we have to wait for Bella and John,’ indicating her married daughter and her husband.

‘Then,’ said the old man, ‘come here bairns and I shall tell you how I spent one of my early New Year’s Days.’

‘Yes, do, grandfather,’ shouted a happy chorus; ‘now for a story.’

‘Not much of a story,’ replied Mr Chisholm, ‘but such as it is you shall have it …’

Mr Chisholm goes on to tell his grandchildren of a New Year’s Day game of shinty, a sport we will engage with later.

In this book I have presented some of the stories not just of Hogmanay, but also, because they are an indivisible part of the same continuum, of the days that go before and after. But there is no denying that, for Scots all over the world, the day itself – particularly that moment when the Old Year ticks over into the New – is one to be celebrated, sometimes against the odds.

The great Orcadian explorer John Rae, working in the Arctic for the Hudson’s Bay Company, recorded of midwinter 1846/47:

On Christmas and New Year’s Day a double allowance of fuel and flour was supplied. Fat venison steaks and plum pudding which a spirited game at foot ball gave a keen appetite, were the order of the day. A small supply of brandy from our scanty stock (3 Gallons) made the men feel quite happy, and I will venture to say that few merrier parties could be seen anywhere than they presented.

William Laing, an emigrant travelling to New Zealand on the Bulworth in 1859, stayed up with some companions making merry until eight bells – twelve o’clock – but then kept back a little drink until 5 a.m., when the Bells would have been heard in his native home. ‘My thoughts are over the water,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘I can hear the city clocks of Aberdeen pealing forth the hour of midnight. I have my cup all ready, your good health then I wish.’

Writing in 1899, James McKerrow, in his Reminiscences, recalled his first New Year’s Day in New Zealand in 1859, when he ate strawberries and cream in the warmth of the evening sun, missing the company of friends who would be sitting at the table by a cosy fire, sharing ‘crisp oat cakes and ham, the buttered toast, the currant bun and the other fine things that make up a good Scotch tea’, while, out in the night, the hail beat against the windows.

On 15 January 1918, the Aberdeen Press and Journal reported ‘Stirring Scenes in Trench Caves’, as the Gordon Highlanders: