Notes of the Day

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 3725, 10 January 1913, Page 4

Notes of the Day

HOGMANAY. The ceremonies which were associated with the celebration of Hogmanay by the Scotch community on New Year’s Eve are deep-rooted in the traditions of the past, although it has been impossible in these modern times to preserve all the features of what an unsympathetic historian has called the “annual Scots’ saturnalia.” It used to he the custom, for instance, (says the “Lyttelton Times”) for the children to mark the occasion by “getting themselves swaddled in a great sheet, doubled in front, so as to form a vast pocket,” and then making house-to-house cal’s in search of gifts of oat-calce. _ Several chants were regarded as suitable to the occasion, the only most commonly used running thus: My feet’s could, my slioon’s thin; Gie’s my cakes and let me rin! Another verse, which was longer and therefore less popular, had a moralising strain :

Get up, good wife, and dinna sweir. And deal your bread to them that’s

here; For the time will come when ye’ll be

dead. And then ve’ll neither need ale nor

bread. The housewives were expected to have prepared for the visits by providing an extra store of oatcake, and it was “no unpleasing scene to see the children going laden home, each with his large apron bellying out before him. stuffed full of cakes, and perhaps scarcely able to waddle under the load.” Mummers, of “guisers,” used to play a conspicuous part in the Hogmanay celebrations throughout Scotland. It was their part to call at as many houses as possible and to sing appropriate songs while disguised in flowing robes and masks. The householder - was expected to pay a halfpenny for the entertainment. In this part of the world our Scottish brethren anticipate the advent of their treat- festival in less picturesque ways, ut they- never fail to claim New Year’s Day as their own or to count it among the beneficent- institutions they- have conferred among the British people.