First-footers and other stories

...having to do with Hogmanay

As an island-nation of mongrel descent, regional differences are never more visible in Britain than when celebrating the midwinter holiday. If England does Christmas, Scotland bides its time till Hogmanay, the last day of year, a time to share a slice of gingerbread and a dram when visitors came to the door. For the children (said my Scots-born grandmother) there were baked apples and lemon barley-water and we were allowed warm treacle and cream on our morning porridge instead of cold milk and a sprinkle of salt.

As a general rule, the midwinter rituals of the cold lands of the north, where the growing-season is short and winter lasts for around half the year, have to do with lighting fires to encourage the return of the sun. In the highlands and islands of Scotland, however, there was always a risk of unwelcome visitors from the North. The ever-present threat of marauding Vikings, blond and blue-eyed in land of dark-haired, brown eyed Celts, lies behind the Scottish custom of First-Footing, a ritual designed to ensure that whoever stepped over the threshold after midnight was friend rather than foe.

At a time when isolated households in the highlands and islands were at their most vulnerable, families and neighbours gathered together for safety as much as for the music and dancing and the chance of a bite and a dram. Entrance was traditionally paid for with a log of wood or a piece of coal for the fire. And since it was to be hoped that the first person to step over the threshold be a dark-haired Celt rather than a blond-maned Viking, any yellow-haired blue-eyed first-footer would find himself bundled out of the door till the year had safely turned.

Dark-haired brown-eyed visitors (my brother and me) brought good luck and an absence of Vikings for the next twelfth-month - so said our paternal grandmother, Marjorie Maitland. Born and bred in the Highlands, she’d married an Englishman. Grandad had been born on a sheep-farm in Australia in the mid-1880’s but came home to join the Royal Navy in WWI. He flew string-and-balsa-wood reconnaissance planes over the trenches, earned his wings, and survived to find himself a wife, my grandmother, Miss Maitland of Edinburgh.

Throughout her marriage and children - the eldest of her three sons, my father, died in WW2 flying bombers over the Atlantic - she continued to ignore the festivities of Christmas in favour of church, silent contemplation, nothing sweet (not even tablet, fudge made with condensed milk, my favourite). But everything changed at Hogmanay, when she appeared at the top of the stairs in a beautiful satin ball-gown with a tartan sash (blue and green with streaks of scarlet) held in place with a sparkling diamond thistle-brooch.

But for my brother and me, the fun started earlier, in the middle of the day, when we took invitations to Hogmanay all around the neighbourhood, ringing on doorbells and talking to strangers (not usually encouraged). On our return home, the house had already begun to fill up with visitors, some of them wearing kilts with sporans and a dagger stuck in their stockings, and there was pipe-music on the gramophone, a wind-up affair, so that everyone could dance the Gay Gordons and Strip the Willow and we children had to learn the formal patterns counting on our fingers - in and out, back to back, curtsy to the left, bow to the right - and were allowed to stay up for as long we pleased.

The following day, first of the New Year, was an outdoor-day, whatever the weather. Everyone gathered the debris from the night before and built a huge bonfire in the garden, warming our hands against the flames while Granny told us stories of Hogmanay when she was a young girl and lived in a draughty castle in the Highlands at a time when Queen Victoria was on the throne.

This wasn’t as romantic as it sounds, she said, because all the firewood for cooking had to be fetched from the log-pile in the yard and you had to have a bath in front of the kitchen fire and the bedclothes were always wringing wet. In those days, she added, First-Footers had to walk for miles to visit their neighbours, though some of these were young men, very handsome, who came because they were courting.

So we asked Granny if Grandpa, who looked very handsome in his uniform in the portrait in the hall, was one of the young men who came courting at Hogmannay. “Mind your own business," said Granny. But her mouth turned up a little at the corners and her cheeks turned quite pink, so we knew it must be true.

p.s. Beloved paid subscribers (not that I don’t value all my precious subscribers who tell me you enjoy my work) will very shortly be in receipt of a recipe for a whisky toddy with oatmeal, Athol Brose, just time for Hogmanay.