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Christmas and New Year: Tale of two nations|Rosemary Goring

蘋果日報 2020/12/13 10:31


When the governments of the four nations agreed to allow the UK to celebrate Christmas with a temporary lifting of lockdown restrictions, there was widespread relief. There was surprise, too: not at the novelty of such widely divergent politicians agreeing on anything, but that the window in which three households were allowed to meet over the festive period was five days long.
Five days! It’s a lifetime. Not so many years ago, Christmas was almost a forbidden word in Scotland. Now, the prospect of relatives being confined under one roof for the best part of a week – quite apart from the risk of passing on germs – is almost as weird as everything else this year.
You could see the strain in the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s face as she made the national announcement. Shortly thereafter she offered her personal guidance, urging people not to take advantage of the relaxation in rules if they wanted to stay safe. She made it known that she and her husband will be celebrating by going for a walk with relatives, rather than congregating indoors.
In a bygone era, even this would have been considered decadent. My mother, a Londoner who moved to Edinburgh when she married my father in 1950, never forgot her shock at the bleakness of Christmas in the north. Still reeling at the paucity of vegetables and fruit on offer, she was truly dismayed to discover that hardly anyone made a fuss about festivities.
Thanks to her, and her love of Charles Dickens, the father of the English Christmas, she made December 25 as much like a scene from one of his novels as possible. When she was a child, these few days were the focal point of the English year. Food preparation began weeks or months in advance – brandy-soaked plum puddings, richly iced Christmas cakes, suety mince pies, three-bird roasts, and all the trimmings. As well as sending each other cards, people splashed out generously on gifts. They decorated their homes with trees and holly, ahead of hosting family and friends for a sumptuous feast. No child’s day was complete if it did not begin with finding a large sock stuffed with presents hanging on the end of the bed.
In Scotland, meanwhile, it was not even a public holiday. Most people went to work on Christmas Day, a tradition harking back to the country’s Calvinist roots. Even as innocent an object as a tree hung with baubles was seen as evidence of moral rot. From the Reformation in 1560, when an unforgiving brand of Protestantism was embraced, anything redolent of the Catholic Church and its love of ornamentation and gaiety was more than frowned upon. It was condemned outright. When in 1958 Christmas finally became a public holiday, in line with everywhere else, suspicion lingered.
But in case you think Scots were entirely joyless in the years before 1958, we had – still have – our own big day. For us, New Year’s eve is widely seen as the main event. Hogmanay, as it’s known, has been enshrined in our culture probably since pagan times. It was 1600 before our new year aligned with the rest of Europe – previously it fell on March 25 – but regardless of the actual date, it has been a day of ceaseless carousing and the ritual visiting of friends, family and neighbours, bearing lumps of coal or black bun, to signify good health and fortune in the coming year. Only the very young or most aged did not stay up until midnight, to welcome in the bells. For many, the toasting and singing and dancing went on all night. In my childhood home, by contrast, the lights were out by eleven, and all of us in bed.
Even today, wherever you go on the morning of January 1, streets are eerily quiet. Yet in England the moment can pass almost unnoticed. On a visit to London as a student, I could not believe that on the night of December 31 my friends went to bed before Big Ben ushered in the dawning year. To be honest, it was rather a relief. Diary entries for Scots on Ne’er Day, as it is termed, are often filled with remorse for overdoing it the night before, followed by highly optimistic lists of resolutions, first of which is sobriety.
Now the way we approach Christmas is no different from anywhere else in these isles. In that sense, we are guilty of having our cake and eating it, with two high points in the space of a week rather than the out-dated one. But as with all aspects of cultural change, old customs are not entirely forgotten, and hold a significance that endures.
The preeminence of Christmas in England says much for the country’s self-image. Carol-singing in English university chapels, broadcast throughout the UK, is not merely a signifier of tradition and Godliness, but of middle-class comfort and privilege. Images of carol-singers huddled in the cold, as in Kenneth Graham’s peerless children’s novel The Wind in the Willows, are shorthand for the closeness of a well-ordered rural community and its resilience.
In Scotland, on the other hand, our New Year celebrations send out a rather different message. The internationally renowned Hogmanay festival held in Edinburgh – this year apart – when every hotel and Airbnb bed is snapped up months in advance, and tens of thousands crowd the streets, captures the air of excitement, fun and licence of the day. New Year is a much edgier carnival, liable to get out of hand.
The unbridled drinking with which it is associated has its origins in a grindingly poor society. It harks back to the days when the labouring and working classes had little leisure; some used this brief respite to take the edge off daily hardship and grind. While an olde-worlde Christmas is portrayed as a time of thankfulness and sharing, with children at its heart, New Year is less tame. One holds onto the good things of the past, the other is open-ended and forward-looking. Those differences are reflected in a broader sense, throughout the rest of the year. If the English Christmas represents holding the traditional line, Hogmanay stretches even further back, to wilder and less respectful or law-abiding times. We are no more wild or lawless than any other nation, but for one day every year, some Scots act as if we were.
(Rosemary Goring is a journalist, writer and editor. Her books include Scotland: The Autobiography, Scotland: Her Story and the novels After Flodden and Dacre’s War. She is currently writing a book about Mary, Queen of Scots, and lives in the Scottish Borders, closer to England than Edinburgh. )
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