Hey Gang!
The Tinkers want to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
And regarding the annual calendar change; this article recently came to our attention, and we believe that it merits a wider distribution. You can see the original and read more commentary at this address
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/12/31/do3104.xml
[I particularly like the fact that the author categorizes wine as a non-alcoholic drink! - enjoy!]
...and By The Way... This is your last chance to vote in
THE SECOND ANNUAL CELTIC MUSIC AWARDS. Just go to Celtic Music Awards and vote for us under CELTIC FOLK MUSIC: FOLK BAND.
The combination of you - our myspace friends - and our email list members are over 8000 strong and if everyone votes we could have a very good chance of winning!! You can vote until December 31 2006.
The devil divides Scotland from England
By Bruce Anderson, Sunday Telegraph
Until a generation ago, the two principal tribes in these islands had a wholly divergent approach to the year's final week. The English celebrated Christmas, a jollity that they had spent centuries in embellishing. But there was no public holiday on New Year's Day.
In Scotland, that was the most sacred holiday of them all, while Christmas was a normal working day. The Scots were suspicious of Christmas. The "mas" bit sounded Popish, and it was all bound up with the New Testament. The Scots preferred the Old one.
Over the past few decades, the ceremonies would appear to have converged, as the whole nation closes down for a fortnight. Yet there are still profound differences, expressive of national character: and the English do not know how to celebrate the New Year.
Christmas, as the English have perfected it, is a festival of light. So it should be, given its theological origins. Despite the best efforts of the commercialisers and the politically correct, it has not lost all contact with them. There are lights everywhere, and the main Christmas meal tends to be at lunchtime, so that it can at least start in the daylight.
The English try to celebrate New Year in a similar spirit. There is an expansive dinner followed, perhaps, by a slight hiatus, until 12 strikes and the jollity regains momentum, no doubt assisted by champagne corks.
It is all very different in North Britain. Whether or not it is linked to the winter solstice, the festival of Hogmanay has little to do with Christianity. The very name points to profoundly pagan origins and its meaning is lost in antiquity. Any suggestion that it means "all men drink like hogs" is Sassenach slander.
Hogmanay is about darkness. It is a ceremony based on the three "Ds": the dark, the devil and the dram. That is why a proper Scottish New Year does not start until midnight. The previous hours are spent lining the stomach with heavy food and non-alcoholic beverages, such as wine, so that the innards are fortified against the onslaught of the whisky bottle.
Then midnight strikes: the blackest hour, when the forces of darkness dominate. How to repel them? Strong drink, strong men, who go in procession from house to house, bearing bottles of whisky and lumps of coal. The darkest-visaged is chosen to put the first foot across the threshold, so that, however black the features, it will be a friendly first foot — and not Satan. The first foot's lump of coal is a harmless addition to the domestic hearth, not fuel borrowed from the infernal furnaces.
So Hogmanay may have some tenuous links with Christianity. It appears to draw from the two elements which the Scots always found most inspiring: hell fire and the devil. In the spirit fired up from eternal conflict, the Scots spend the first six hours or so of the New Year keeping the de'il at bay with their equivalent of a crucifix and garlic: whisky. The word "whisky" is a corruption of the Gaelic for the water of life: its vital function on New Year's morn.
After a rest for sleep and rehydration, Hogmanay resumes around lunchtime on January 1, just to ensure that the devil has been kept off the premises. In recent years, January 2 has also become a virtual holiday in Scotland and one can understand why. It is not actually known as liver-function resumption day, but that is the general idea.
This is not to say that there will be no hangovers in England this Tuesday. But there is a crucial difference. A hungover Englishman is merely a victim of overindulgence. A Scots hangover is a war wound, mightily earned in a desperate combat with the hosts of hell.
The English celebrate New Year as if they were Hobbits in Tolkien's Shire; the Scots celebrate Hogmanay as if they were Aragorn on the frontier of Mordor. Long may the difference continue. Happy New Year.