Highland Yule Traditions

[Steve Ashton]

Folks,

Just a friendly word.

This and another thread have both been flagged for posting personal religious beliefs.

While it is the time of the year when many members do celebrate, and some of those celebrations are religious in nature, we kindly remind everyone that we have many members from around the world with many religious beliefs.

Religious beliefs are personal and this forum respects your right to your personal beliefs. All we ask is that you respect the rights of your fellow members in return and not put your personal beliefs into your posts.

This thread is about seasonal traditions in the Scottish Highlands.

[O'Callaghan]

I didn't realise that Christmas became a holiday as long ago as 1957 in Scotland, but that's probably right. It was Boxing Day (aka St Stephen's Day, i.e. the day after Xmas) that became a holiday in Scotland during times that I can recall. This happened at the same time as New Year's Day became a holiday in England. I know this was later than 1976, because I passed my motorcycle test on New Year's Day that year, as it was not yet an English holiday (and by extension Boxing Day had not yet become one in Scotland) which makes people do a double take.

New Year's Eve is celebrated in Scotland as Hogmanay, and many needed the next day off to recover, but it was not such a major thing in England, any more than Christmas and Boxing Day were in Scotland. In the North of England they have 'first footing' where people go from house to house on New Year's Eve and are given drinks, but no-one does this further South.

Boxing Day was always the biggest sale in England (the Canadians also have Boxing Day off, but they have Boxing Week sales that last all week). Incredibly, I'm told there are now Black Thursday sales in England, even though they still do not celebrate Thanksgiving (and most likely never will). Canada has Thanksgiving as well as Boxing Day, so the best of both worlds, but I don't think they do Thanksgiving on the same day? Americans wondering about turkey never fear, because the English do it on Xmas Day, but I'm not sure if Scots stuff themselves with turkey atall? I wonder if they have Black Thursday in Scotland?

[Father Bill]

Yeah, our Canadian Thankdgiving is in October because of its ties to the old Church Harvest services. My American friends will have to chime in here, but I think their date may be tied to Pilgrim history.

[Pleater]

To digress from the older and more Northerly traditions to the customs of my childhood

In Yorkshire, being in the North of England and having an amalgamation of many traditions we celebrated them all - I was reminded today of having white flowers - we used to have huge pompom chrysanthemums, in the house at Christmas, as the old Christmas colours were green and white - with red, gold and blue which were sometimes associated with the gifts of the wise men.

Never red with the white flowers, though - red and white flowers together, or either colour with decoration or a vase of the other are an ill omen. Many years I have bought flowers cheaply just before Christmas in bunches which have red and white together and the supermarkets do not know why they have not sold. I separate them before taking them into the house even now - just in case.

We used to go around the orchard to wassail the trees, went carol singing for pennies, to the neighbours to 'let the New Year in' - my hair was very long, thick and dark back then and a lot of people around us were fair haired so I was considered a lucky-bird, a youth bringing good fortune and prosperity.

Pagan, Christian and heathen customs were all part of my upbringing - plus a touch of steampunk, perhaps, as in watching for the sunset being later in the days after school finished for the year and there was also the time honoured tradition of brief electrocution whilst getting the lights on the tree up and running on Christmas eve....

It was the customs which were kept, not the beliefs, which were all long forgotten or disregarded. Typical Viking behaviour, apparently.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[KentuckyCeltophile]

Yeah, our Canadian Thankdgiving is in October because of its ties to the old Church Harvest services. My American friends will have to chime in here, but I think their date may be tied to Pilgrim history.

Father Bill, you are on the right track. However, the actual date was more influenced by retailers and business owners in 1941, when it became a permanate national holiday. The idea of setting aside a "day of thanks to God" was a common practice held by early English settlers as early as 1607. Some sources say the first offical day was on 13 December, 1621 which was held by the Pilgrims in the Massechusetts colony. From that time until 1941, it was held by individual states from early November to mid-December. Initially, the time for thanksgiving occurred usually after harvest time or when they survived harsh New England winters.


Cheers,
KC

[macwilkin]

Someone mentioned the custom of "First Footing" on Hogmanay; that custom evidently immigrated to the New World with the Scots, as the noted Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph, in his magnum opus Ozark Magic and Folklore documents a very similar custom among the largely Ulster-Scottish hillmen -- though the concern about fair-haired strangers crossing one's threshold seemed to have wained by then; perhaps there just wasn't a threat of a Norseman invasion in SW Missouri? <grin>

Interestingly, Randolph also documents that the hill folk tended to celebrate "Old Christmas" on January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, when tradition says the Magi visited the Holy Family. I've always wondered how much of this came from their Scottish heritage?

A great many of the old-timers call December 25 "New Christmas" in order to distinguish it from "Old Christmas," which falls on January 6. They tell me that in pioneer days nearly everybody celebrated Christmas twelve days later than they do now. Old folks say that elderberry always sprouts on the eve of Old Christmas even if the ground is frozen hard, you'll find the little green shoots under the snow. A man at Pineville, Missouri, told me that bees in a hive always buzz very loudly exactly at midnight on the eve of Old Christmas ; if several bee gums are set close together, the "Old Christmas hum" can be heard some distance away. This shows that January 6, not December 25, is the real Christmas. Mrs. Isabel Spradley, Van Buren, Arkansas, tells me that the old folks in her neighborhood sometimes call January 6 "Green Christmas" or the "Twelfth Night." It is on January 5, the eve of Old Christmas, that the cattle are supposed to kneel down and bellow, exactly at midnight, in honor of the birth of Jesus. Some say that the critters have the gift of speech on this night, so that they may pray aloud in English. Mrs. Spradley quotes an old woman with reference to the family water supply : "Our well had a charm put on it the night the cows talked, and I wouldn't clean it out for silver !" I don't know what the charm is that this old woman referred to, but there are people in Arkansas today who say that the water in certain wells turns into wine at midnight on January 5.

It is said that on the morning of Old Christmas there are two daybreaks instead of one I have talked with men who claim to have seen this phenomenon. Boys born on Old Christmas are supposed to be very lucky in raising cattle ; some say that these "Old Christmas children" can actually talk the cow brute's language. There are old men in the Ozarks today who swear that they have actually seen cattle kneel down and bellow on Old Christ- mas eve. But skepticism sometimes prevails, even in the Ozarks. A neighbor tells me that when he was a boy he watched repeatedly to see his father's oxen kneel but was always disappointed. His parents told him, however, that the presence of a human observer broke the spell, and that cattle must always salute the Saviour in private. "But I just drawed a idy right thar," he added thoughtfully, "that they warn't nothin' to it, nohow." In some settlements this notion about the cattle kneeling has shifted from Old Christmas to New Year's. Mr. Elbert Short, of Crane, Missouri, told me that his sister slipped out to the barn one New Year's Eve "to see the critters kneel down and talk." At exactly twelve o'clock one old cow fell on her knees and let out two or three low moans. A moment later another animal knelt but with this the girl suddenly became fright- ened and ran back to the house. Another funny thing, says Mr. Short, is that if you go out before midnight on New Year's Eve and cut an elderbush off flush with the ground, by sunrise it will have "pooched up" at least two inches.

NOTE: the preceding was posted for informational purposes only.

[KentuckyCeltophile]

In the Hogmanay special, the plot is about paranormal activity, ghosts, and ghost stories. Is that significant or is that just curious playwriting tactics? Just wondering.
KC

[Mike_Oettle]

Mention of first-footing calls to mind what my Manchester-born father-in-law had to say about it.
Early in the Second World War he was posted, as a Fleet Air Arm aircraft fitter, to Arbroath, where he served in a naval test squadron, working on various classes of aircraft.
Being dark-haired he was especially popular at Hogmanay, and first-footed a good many homes, carrying in a lump of coal and being rewarded with a shot of whisky. He was there for two years (two Hogmanays) before being posted to Cape Town, where he met his wife.

Noting that Scottish celebrations of Christmas were ended by the Reformation (at least in areas controlled by the Presbyterians) calls to mind that Cromwell banned Christmas in England, too.
Men were sent out to punish people who celebrated Christmas and to destroy their decorations and their festive meals.
The Restoration saw an end to this suppression, but things could easily have taken a different turn.
Regards,
Mike

[Pleater]

The calendar was changed in - I think 1750 - ish, when eleven days were 'lost' in order to align the date with the continent of Europe.

The new year was also to be counted as starting in January rather than April, which was all a bit much for some people, and also caused great confusion about what year things happened.

Old Christmas day's date was shifted, and not being slow to take a yard when an inch was offered, the holiday was stretched from New Christmas day, when the date was right, to old Christmas day where it used to be.

Britain does not celebrate Thanksgiving and the sales this year were the first time there have been really widespread 'Black Friday' sales, at least as far as I can tell.

It will be a memorable year for some as Amazon went wrong and sold a load of things for pennies, so some people have got amazing bargains.

We do have Harvest festivals, a church service of thanksgiving for the year's bounty, but it is not a family festivity and the date passes without any great notice being taken.

My family Twelfth Cake is entirely separate from Christmas cake and to a different recipe. Christmas cakes are made in load tins, the Twelfth cake is in the annular tin.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[jfraser]

You are quite right David, Christmas only became a public holiday in Scotland in 1957 (which it hadn't been at least since the Scottish Reformation in 1560 or shortly thereafter). When my grandmother was a child in Macduff in the 1910's and 20's Santa Claus left gifts at the New Year.

Certainly not wishing to dispute the fact about 1957 but, I was working in the North East of Scotland in 1961 in a relatively large firm and Christmas was certainly worked by everybody in the firm except for one worker, an English man and it appears that he always took Christmas off. At that time in this area Hogmanay and New Year's Day was the day of celebration. In my family Christmas was not Celebrated until some time in the 1960's and started off as a watered down version of Hogmanay. Of course, Scotland being quite diverse I accept in other areas and within individual families Christmas could have been celebrated much earlier than this.