new year Versus new yule
Each has its own much loved traditions, but which celebration is the occasion we really do hold most dear?
BORN in 1966, I grew up in a Free Church manse, a less austere experience than you might think. But my father held no Christmas services and no carols were sung in public worship.
At home, we kept the occasion in a gentle way – presents in the morning, the Queen in the afternoon and a turkey dinner come dusk – but we were not allowed a tree. And, should Christmas fall on the Sabbath, festivities were postponed till the following day.
In our tradition, New Year was the big thing, as it remains in the smaller and still more robust Free Presbyterian Church, which yet refuses to have any truck with Yule.
In fact, the keeping of Christmas minimally or not at all was general Scottish custom until at least the 1930s.
And in some ways New Year is still a bigger deal for us than it is down south. Most Scots make a point of waiting up for ‘the bells’ and, from Orkney to the shores of the Forth, many communities still have special sports or entertainments on January 1.
It is startling to learn that it was only in 1958 that Christmas became a public holiday in Scotland and, for years thereafter, not one widely observed. My grandfather routinely went to work on December 25; many shops, into the 1970s, stayed open and MacBrayne’s ferries voyaged as usual on the day until 1966 – unless, of course, it was the Sabbath.
Boxing Day did not itself become an official Scottish holiday until 1974 and January 2 – uniquely in the United Kingdom – is still a jealously guarded day off on this side of the Border. It is not, contrary to myth, because Christmas was even in Victorian times excoriated by Presbyterian clergy. But it was seen, till after the Second World War, as little more than a mild amusement for children.
My late grandmother, born in 1912, remembered she always got an apple, and in my research into the history of two notable Scottish schools the very word ‘Christmas’ is not mentioned in old magazines till the 1930s.
WE now expect our parish church to hold a Watchnight service late on Christmas Eve – but the first ever, in an Edinburgh congregation of the Church of Scotland, was only celebrated in 1947.
It was two most modern developments that first gave Noel serious Scottish legs. One was the advent of broadcasting, from 1922 – radio, of course; it would be 1952 before there was any television in Scotland – exposing us to the averred joys of an English Christmas.
And then, on December 25, 1932, and as if he were deliberately making the day respectable, King George V made the first Christmas broadcast of a sovereign to Britain and the Empire, and with a beautiful script by Rudyard Kipling. ‘I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them…’
With rare exceptions, our monarch has addressed us on Christmas Day ever since and over time this must have worn down much resistance to its rites.
The reason Christmas was, historically, of so little interest to Scots was, of course, the Reformation, which arrived with remarkable totality in 1560. Only in a few remote pockets (Banffshire, Galloway and the Great Glen) did Catholic worship survive.
There was a significant cultural difference. In England, and on the terms finally agreed in the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’, ceremonies and ‘Holy Days’ were permitted as long as they were not expressly forbidden by Scripture.
In Scotland, nothing was allowed in worship save what the Bible expressly commanded, which is why as recently as the 1860s you would not have found a Presbyterian church in the land that sang hymns or played an organ.
When liturgical change began, it set in rapidly and chiefly because of the rapid growth of the Scottish Episcopal Church, whose numbers were fatted by English and Irish immigration.
Faced with hordes of worshippers voting with their feet for fancier worship, Presbyterians fast buckled and only the smallest denominations today (largely Highland) still stoutly cleave to a cappella Psalm singing.
When we pressed my father as to why our family Christmas was a much more low-key affair than that of our Glasgow neighbours, he told us, quite correctly, that in its essentials – the date, the evergreens, the feasting and wassailing – Christmas is of pagan origin. That only two of the Gospels, and none of the Epistles, even mention the birth of Christ.
That sheep and shepherds would never have been out on the hill at such a daft time of the year and that much of what we think about the Nativity just ain’t so. Neither of the Gospel accounts says that Christ was born in a stable; Matthew expressly says that the ‘wise men from the East’ finally found the Infant in a house – and, that while there at least two Magi and perhaps quite a few more, that there were precisely Three Wise Men is nowhere stipulated.
Daddy might have added that it was Victoria and Albert who first popularised the custom of a decorated fir tree and that many features of the modern Yule – from the desirability of turkey to its associations with charitable endeavour – we owe, really, to Charles Dickens. And that Santa Claus as we now generally imagine him was invented by the Coca-Cola corporation.
New Year has much to be said for it as our primary winter feast. Making it into another calendar year is in itself most logical cause for thanksgiving, as those old school magazines darkly remind one; before the advent of antibiotics few sessions passed without the death of several pupils.
But New Year is of admirable minimalism – steak pie (the stew traditionally made at home, but finished en masse and for many local households by the village baker, who would slap on puffpastry before shoving pies by the dozen into his huge oven), black bun, shortbread and first-footing. It is often, of course – and especially by our sneering brethren down south – associated with irresponsible drinking.
That, no doubt, is sadly so with many. But it overlooks the fact that, by historic measure, drink is almost absurdly cheap.
aBOUT 1960, a bottle of whisky would have cost almost a week’s wages for an unskilled labourer and Tricia Marwick, former Presiding Officer of the Scottish parliament, remembers her miner father going out to buy a half-bottle on Hogmanay and, as he came home, he slipped, and it smashed.
‘That was it for us. We went to bed early, lights off, curtains drawn – no New Year celebration for us.’
He could not afford to buy another, and there was no question of receiving first-footers when no refreshment could be offered.
A late friend on the Isle of Harris, talking of going to some village dance in the mid-Fifties, recalled that a quarter-bottle was thought ample refreshment the whole night long for him and his three mates.
The real problem at New Year has long been not excessive drinking, but people drinking who are not used to it. For many, especially in the Highlands and until very recent years, it was the only time they ever drank.
On the Isle of Lewis, New Year still has a certain gravity and there is a near-universal custom that, even if you are out with friends, you head home about half-eleven to share ‘the bells’ with your family, before venturing forth again.
That is because, even after almost a century, the date is indelibly associated with the Iolaire catastrophe, when a ship stuffed with more than 200 naval ratings, on their way home after the Great War, was wrecked at the mouth of Stornoway harbour on January 1, 1919. In total, 205 men drowned.
It remains the worst peacetime British disaster at sea since the Titanic, and haunts the island still.
But New Year is elsewhere marked in Scotland with some exuberance – urban street parties (most famously in Edinburgh), the Loony Dook in the frigid Firth of Forth as the hardy bathe in fancy dress, the traditional Orcadian game of Kirkwall Ba’ and in Burghead, Moray, the Burning of the Clavie.
The latter is, in fact, celebrated not on the eve of January 1, but on the eve of the 12th – because Burghead is still on the old, preSeptember 1752 Julian calendar and does not care for being told what to do.
And what could be more Scottish than that?