Edinburgh Hogmanay Celebrations

Hogmanay is the name Scots give to New Year's Eve , a celebration they have made all their own with a unique mix of tradition, hedonism, sentimentality and enthusiasm. The roots of the Hogmanay are in ancient pagan festivities based around the winter solstice, which in most places gradually merged with Christmas. When hardline Scottish Protestant clerics in the sixteenth century abolished Christmas for being a Catholic mass, the Scots, not wanting to miss out on a mid-winter knees-up, instead put their energy into greeting the New Year.

Houses were cleaned from top to bottom, debts were paid and quarrels made up, and, after the bells of midnight were rung, great store was laid by welcoming good luck into your house. This still takes the form of the tradition of "first-footing" - visiting your neighbours and bearing gifts. The ideal first-foot is a tall dark-haired male carrying a bottle of whisky; women or redheads, on the other hand, bring bad luck & though to be honest no one carrying a bottle of whisky tends to be turned away these days, whatever the colour of their hair. All this neighbourly greeting meant that a fair bit of partying went on, of course, and after a while no one was expected to go to work the next day, or, if the party was that good, the day after that either. Even today, January 1 is a public holiday in the rest of the UK, but only in Scotland does the holiday extend to the next day too. In fact, right up to the 1950s Christmas was a normal working day for many people in Scotland, and Hogmanay was widely regarded as by far the more important celebration.

Over the years, Hogmanay street parties in the middle of towns and cities became popular, often centred around a prominent clockface which would ring out "the bells" at midnight. These days, the largest New Year's Eve street party in Europe takes place in Edinburgh, with around 100,000 people on the streets of the city enjoying the culmination of a week-long series of events. On the night itself, stages are set up in different parts of the city centre, with big name rock groups and local ceilidh bands playing to the increasingly inebriated masses. The high point of the evening is, of course, midnight, when hundreds of tons of fireworks are let off into the night sky above the castle, and Edinburgh joins the rest of the world singing "Auld Lang Syne" , an old Scottish tune with lyrics by Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet.