PAT McDERMOTT

The New Year demands a tall dark man be the first over the threshold – or is that just splitting hairs?

If it had been up to my dad, Peter, he would have spent every New Year’s Eve watching his favourite ice hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens, lose another game.

“Played like donkeys, the lot of them,” he’d mutter before heading up the stairs to read the crime novel he got in his Christmas stocking.

Unfortunately for him, in those days the quaint custom of First Footing imported from Scotland and Northern England, was still practiced in Canada.

“What’s First Footing?” asked Audrey, our eldest grandchild.

“It’s when you hop on only one foot! I’m a good hopper! Watch!” said her little sister, Eleanor, bouncing wildly down the hallway, leaving Vegemite fingerprints here and there en route.

“First Footing isn’t hopping,” I explained. “It’s an old tradition in some countries. The first person who steps through your door after midnight on New Year’s Eve should be a tall man with dark hair. If it is you’ll have good luck for the whole year.

“Unless you live in Sweden and then the tall man should be blonde.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” sniffed Audrey who will be in Year Four when school goes back and wise beyond her years. “If it was true it could only work if everybody had dark hair or everybody had blonde hair.

“Well, that’s what they say,” I explained. “It’s just a funny custom. And the dark haired man or the blonde man usually brings a silver coin, some yummy food and a bottle of whisky as well.”

“Daddy has whisky in the cupboard in the dining room but only in case of an emergency,” volunteered

Eleanor helpfully.

“That’s good to know,” I said. I explained that my dad was tall and had black hair so neighbours often asked him to be the first person through their doors at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Every year my mum and dad put a bottle of whisky and a homemade Christmas pudding in a special bag my mother had knitted for the purpose and set off through the snow to their friends’ New Year’s Eve parties.

“It’s a tough job, going from party to party, but somebody has to do it,” Dad would wink, as he tucked me into bed and wagged his finger at my older sister, already on the phone complaining to friends about having to babysit on New Year’s Eve.

“But what if you have yellow hair or red hair or purple hair or green hair?” asked Eleanor. “Don’t you ever get to go through the door first?

“Can a woman with dark hair be good luck too or does it have to be a man?” asked Audrey, warming to the injustice of it all. “What about bald people or people like Pop who have hardly any hair?

“It’s just a funny old tradition,” I said lamely.

“But it’s not fair! People who have green hair or blonde hair or purple hair or no hair can bring good luck too!”

Still muttering, they went outside to sit in the sun. They ate Vegemite sandwiches, drank their juice and appeared to be discussing what could be done to make life fairer for the redhead, the blonde, the bald and all the rest of us whose hair gets a little help from time to time.

It seems to me the future is in good, if very small, hands.

Happy 2020 dear friends. AWW