A guid New Year, or bliadhna Mhath Ùr, tae ye. Here’s howpin ye’d a cantie Yuletide tae.
Officially and culturally, here in Scotland, it’s mibby no done yet. Theres some accounts will tell you the entire ‘season’, 25th December to 6th January, was known in Scots as the ‘daft days’. So, the daft days are over, right?
Despite any well-intended attempts to maintain a semblance of cultural continuum they represent, such assertions highlight a perception gap in the anthropological and historical record. As we passed Uphalyday/Epiphany/Twelfth Night, this blog attempted to gear back up into the year by exploring some of that gap relevant to perceptions of them. Almost inevitably, given reasons for a gap in the first place, they stalled.
Dusted down and undaunted, or at least having chased a few daunts oot the door, the mechanics of it indicate it is worth testing both key and ignition again, if for nothing else but to add a few well intended paving slabs to the apocryphal highway to the netherworld.
Theres a double-edged motivation to that intent. Eagle-eyed readers will have noted a longer tail-off in publishing on this blog toward the end of 2023. This was largely due to another perception gap, of a starker and more directly debilitating (at least for some neurodivergent people, yours truly included) kind.
It is hoped, as this blog returns to regularly scheduled service by exploring one gap in general perception, this can become enabling in also allowing it (and this correspondent) to explore that other gap from a more oblique angle. It’s either that or it curtails writing here altogether, as it has threatened to do over the last few months.
For the sake of establishing a little context, it is worth noting that I intended to publish a blog on this other gap, based on the results of a then recently released survey, back in early November last year, according to my research notes and file dates. I’m going to include as much of it ‘in the raw’ as time and relevance passed will allow here.
As a significant aspect of that relevance and context, it is also worth, ethnographically speaking, looking at both the delay caused by disabling circumstance (including what that is/was) and how this manifested in my writing. I will get back to both phenomena but, for now, will stick a pin in them noting, for the sake of my own neuropsychological health, I’m taking some cover in wider ethnological perception gaps. Including those relating to how we perceive of and mark time.
Theres a lot to cover and a plethora of notes, none of which derive from those, referred to in other posts, which just need typing up. Its worth reiterating, typing, so much typing.
Intially, as I tried to hit a stride for the new year, it seemed, given their interconnectedness, worth publishing just one lengthy post, drawing out those connections. The more I tried, though, the less sense it made. It was three or four posts worth, so, almost inevitably, I felt a series coming on and here we are.
The connecting thread, given what may be seen as disparate subject matter, is in gaps of perception, as well as in how we mark our so perceived passing of time. To kick things off, let’s go back to those 'daft days'.
Traditionally, in Scotland, the marking of the New Year has long been of greater cultural significance than Christmas and its related calendrical associations. Scots celebrated old rites at this time, many with roots in pre-Christian beliefs which persisted alongside the rise of any church or organised religious influence. It is not difficult to perceive the pagan and Catholic beliefs co-existing, certainly among country folk.
In the Scots language New Year’s Eve has been known as ‘Hogmanay’ since at least the 17th century. It is thought to derive from the French for a New Year’s Eve gift.
In Scots we say ‘haud Hogmanay’ for ‘celebrate the end of the old year’ and, once the New Year comes in, we call it ‘Ne’rday’ or ‘Neerday’ – New Year’s Day. It has been traditional in Scotland to ‘first-fit’ or make a first visit to the homes of friends and neighbours on this day and to bring a ‘handsel’ or gift.
‘Handsel’comes from an old word found in various North European languages and means 'to give with the hand'. It is found in this form in Scots from the 14th century onwards.
The Calvinist church, after 1560, took a dim view of Catholic practices celebrated at Christmas and so discouraged those. Until 1599 the New Year began on 25 March but this was changed to 1 January from 1600 onwards.
All of these things relate to how we, culturally, mark the passing of the seasons and of how we perceive and measure time itself. More specifically, they relate to almanacs, calendars and how we account for what anthropologists concerned with cultural perceptions of time call intercalary days or periods.
In Scotland, we cannot really say when, specifically, the daft days should begin and end, without reference to how perceptions of time have been influenced, culturally and for political ends. For starters, in common with many other cultures, until a few hundred years ago, the year began in March.
So, just moving the start of the year, what was that aw aboot?
Well, as with so much at the time it happened (and as continues to influence our perceptions still, at the fundamental level of how we organise space and time), it was a manifestation of religion as political power. The Julian calendar, according to which the year began on March 25th, had been used throughout the world since ancient times. By the sixteenth century, there was widespread agreement that it improperly calculated the length of a year and had fallen/was falling behind ‘actual’ time.
This resulted in, during the papacy of Gregory XIII, a new calendar being created. What became known as the Gregorian calendar was adopted by most of Europe, with the notable exception of Henry VIII’s England, which had, for reasons well-documented by history, broken with Rome.
Scotland, in 1582, of course had not yet entered into any Union, of Crowns or Parliaments, with England. So, alongside their counterparts across Europe, the Scottish Parliament deliberated on the proposed changes and ultimately, the Scottish Government, just a few years short of the former Union to come, decided January 1st did in fact make a better New Years Day than March 25th.
January 1st 1599 became the new January 1st 1600. As a result, in Scotland, 1599 had only nine months.
When the rest of Europe had adopted the new calendar, in 1582, ten days were dropped from the marked year. When Scotland followed suit and adopted the new calendar, it remained out of line with Europe’s calendars because it did not follow suit.
So, year after year, despite nominally changing calendar and adopting the changed custom of when to mark turning of the year, just as the retained Julian calendar of England did, the newly adopted Scottish Gregorian calendar fell gradually further and further behind European time.
By 1752, Scotland had joined in both monarchical and parliamentary Union with England, albeit distinctly reluctantly on the part of the 'ordinary' people of Scotland, who engaged in widespread protest and rioting against it. So, when England changed to the Gregorian calendar that year, dropping eleven days, Scotland did the same.
It is almost impossible for us to fully understand what imposed changes to how we measure something as fundamental as time did to the perceptions of ordinary people. Multiplying the feelings of disorientation, of living in two times, we experience when clocks are adjusted by an hour for daylight savings time, by 24(hrs) x 11(days), for the ‘dropped’ days, or x 3 months for those also ‘dropped’ in 1599/1600, is likely to simply emphasise a suspicion of the degree being greater than the sum of its parts.
Physiologically, psychologically and neurologically, perceptions of time are not associated with any particular sense in the same way as how we perceive some aspects of the world are. We see colours, hear sounds and feel textures but how do we perceive time? For now, lets pop a pin in answering that, particularly given that it raises more questions than it does definitive answers, and return to it in a more full sense in pt2.
For now, it is worth noting the context in which gaps in perceptions of time have been managed culturally. Much of this falls into what is referred to by anthropogists as 'intercalary days', as referred to above.
Whilst this reference is to intercalation, or embolisim, in timekeeping, in cutural anthropological terms, it refers not only to how calendars are arranged to account for it, but how this is marked in cultures affected by it. In a narrow organisational sense, embolisim is the insertion of a 'leap' day, week, month or months into some calendar years to make them follow the seasons or moon phases. Lunisolar calendars may require intercalations of both days and months.
The solar, or tropical, year does not have a whole number of days. It contains roughly 365.24 days and a calendar year must have a whole number of days. The most common way to reconcile the two, extended over cultures and time, is to vary the number of days in the calendar year.
In solar calendars, this is done by adding a an extra day to the 'common year' of 365 days around every four years. This causes a 'leap' year to have 366 days and can be observed in the Julian, Gregorian and Indian national calendars.
In the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar, seen as instated to improve upon it, intercalation is done by adding an extra day to February in each leap year. In the Julian calendar this is/was done every four years. In the Gregorian, years divisible by 100 but not by 400 were exempted in order to improve accuracy.
Epagomenal days are days in a solar calendar which fall outside of any regular month. Where these are observed (Egyptian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Mayan Haab', and French Republican calendars), usually five epagomenal days are included every year, with a sixth epagomenal day added every four years in some (Coptic, Ethiopian and French Republican).
The solar Hijri calendar, observed in Iran, is based on solar calcualtions and is similar to the Gregorian calendar in its structure. this is with the exception of the Hijrah epoch.
The Baháʼà calendar includes enough epagomenal days (usually four or five) before the last month to ensure the following year begins at the March equinox, known as the Ayyám-i-Há.
The solar year also does not have a whole number of lunar months, being around 12.37 lunations per year. Accordingly, a lunisolar calendar must have a variable number of months in a year. regular years have 12 months but embolismic years insert a 13th intercalary or 'leap' month. Whether to insert such a month is determined using 'cycles', many of which are a matter of cultural perception.
A 19-year Metonic cycle, being the period after which lunar phases recur at the same time of year. In the Babylonian and Hebrew lunisolar calendars, the years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17 and 19 are the long (13 month) years. This cycle forms the basis of the Greek and Hebrew calendars. A 19-year cycle is used for the computation of Easter's date each year.
Other calendars use calculations of lunar phases, such as in the Hindu lunisolar and Chinese calendars. The Buddhist lunisolar calendar, primarily used in Tibet, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as in Malaysia and Singapore and by Chinese populations for religious or official reasons, all with minor, culturally important regional variations but which derive from a common lineage, generally adds both an intercalary day and month.
In principle, lunar calendars do not employ intercalation because they do not seek to synchronise with the seasons, with the motion of the moon being astronomically predictable. Religious lunar calendars, however, rely on actual observation.
The lunar Hijri calendar, observed by most of Islam, depends on observation of the first crescent of the moon and consequently does not have any intercalation. Each month still has either 29 or 30 days but, due to the variable method of observations employed, there is usually no discernible order in the sequencing of lengths. Traditionally, the first day of each month begins at sunset and the first sighting of the hilal, or crescent moon, shortly afterwards. If the hilal is not observed immediately after the 29th day of a month whether due to clouds blocking the view or the western sky still being too bright when the sun sets) then the day which begins at that sunset is the 30th.
The 'Roman calendar' is used primarily to refer to Rome's pre-Julian calendars, though it is often used as inclusive of it. According to most Roman accounts, this 'original' calendar was established by their legendary first king, Romulus
It consisted of ten months, beginning in spring with March and leaving winter as an unassigned span of days before the next year. These months each had 30 or 31 days and ran for 38 nundinal cycles. This meant each formed a kind of eight-day (or nine-day, counted inclusively in the Roman manner) ending with religious rituals and a public market.
This fixed calendar bore traces of its origin as an observational lunar one. In particular, the most important days of each month (its kalends, nones, and ides) seem to have derived from the new moon, the first quarter moon, and the full moon respectively. To a late date, each of these days these were formally proclaimed and Roman dating counted down inclusively towards the next such day in any month.
Even when the calendar was revised to take account of the solar year and the nundinal cycles had completely departed from correlation with moon phases, a pontiff was still obliged to meet the sacred king, claim that he had observed the new moon, and offer a sacrifice to Juno to solemnize each kalends.
Romulus's successor Numa Pompilius is usually credited with a revised calendar that divided winter between the two months of January and February, shortened most other months accordingly, and brought everything into rough alignment with the solar year through intercalation. This is a typical element of lunisolar calendars and was necessary to keep the religious festivals and other activities in their proper seasons. Some of these, even if unofficial, like the original Bacchanalia, even became associated with the intercalary periods themselves, wherein time and all other organising principles (like state, authority and religion, or even space) were perceived as disbanded or inverted during them.
One such festival, often seen as a Roman cognate of other midwinter festivals and thus also modern conceptions of Christmas, as well as other pagan traditions from which some of its observances derive, is Saturnalia.
This was an ancient festival and holiday in honour of the god Saturn, held on 17 December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through 19 December. It was celebrated with a sacrifice and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both them and freed people alike.
A common custom was the election of a "King of the Saturnalia", who gave orders to people, which were followed, and presided over the merrymaking. The gifts exchanged were usually joke gifts or small figurines made of wax or pottery known as sigillaria
Saturnalia was the Roman equivalent to the earlier Greek holiday of Kronia. The Roman philosopher Porphyry interpreted the freedom associated with Saturnalia as symbolizing the "freeing of souls into immortality". Saturnalia appears to have been a cognate of or to have influenced some of the customs associated with later celebrations in western Europe occurring in midwinter, particularly 'pagan' traditions associated with later Christian festivals, like Christmas and Epiphany. In particular, the historical western European Christmas custom of electing a 'Lord of Misrule' may have its roots in Saturnalia or equivalent celebrations.
Whilst the lunar or solar nature of the Aztec calendar is disputed due to idiosyncracies (though, in this regard, a multidisciplinary 'amalgmated' calendar reconstruction in náhuatl, ‘centro de Puebla’ variant, was translated to Spanish and English, and codified as an academic webpage in 2023), other aspects of it have not been contentious. All anthropologists and commentators agree that the calendar year had five intercalary days, after the eighteenth and final month, called the nēmontēmi (translated as 'they fill up in vain' and glossed by Spanish lexicographers as 'dias baldios', or 'wasted days'), which has been seen as associated with reflection on the year past.
In Scotland, it is possible to trace the origins of daft days traditions back to our Pictish and Celtic ancestors, who shared beliefs that the sun stood still or 'died' for 12 days during midwinter. Mistleltoe was cut in the low winter sun and blessed in a celebration of life, with the Yule log lit to bring light into the dark.
In Gaelic speaking areas, Hogmanay was referred to as either ‘Night of the Candle’ or ‘Night of Blows’. The latter is associated with a ritual which involved a man having a dry cow hide placed over his head before being beaten like a drum as he and his friends moved around their home village.
The group would move around each house, turning widdershins, or anti-clockwise, striking the walls and reciting rhymes to raise the householders. As doors opened, the group would pile into each home to receive refreshments such as oatmeal bread, cheese, flesh and a dram of whisky, according to John Gregorson Campbell in his encyclopedia of customs 'The Gaelic Otherworld'. The idea was to 'drown the animosities of the past year in hilarity and merriment'.
Holly also played a role in the party. It was hung in the belief it would keep the fairies away but boys were also whipped with a branch of the greenery. Every drop of blood spilled counted the years the boy would live and although it sounds fairly grim, it was reportedly a ritual practised in good jest among friends.
At Hogmanay, the fire in the home playing a central part in superstitions during the countdown to midnight. It was feared that letting the fire go out would invite bad luck into the home with only householders, or a trusted friend, allowed to tend it. Candles were usually lit as back up to ensure a flame remained in the house on December 31, leading to the name Night of the Candle as a result.
Ne'erday, like the first of every quarter of the year, was a great ‘saining’ day across the Highlands and Islands when rituals were at their most intense to protect cattle and houses from evil. Juniper was burnt in the byre, animals were marked with tar, houses were decked with mountain ash, with door-posts and walls, even the cattle, sprinkled with wine. Purification rituals varied from region to region, even with village-specific variations, and some related to people. These are echoed in the modern 'loony dook', associated with Ne'erday
Up until the not too distant past, many Scots considered Handsel Monday – the first Monday after New Year – as the great winter holiday of the year. For at least 500 years, it was regarded as a day of family and merriment with handsel gifts exchanged between neighbours and friends.
With the holiday a great celebration among rural and farming folk, particularly in the Lowlands, it was usual for workers to be treated in some small way by their 'masters'. On Handsel Monday, half a crown or a shilling would often be collected from 'the big house', with a piece of cake and glass of toddy also shared while the bosses tended to the graft of the day.
Fife and Perthshire were two areas of Scotland where Handsel Monday was celebrated long into the 19th Century, despite New Year’s Day becoming the holiday of choice in cities such as Dundee and Glasgow. A report in the Dunfermline Press in 1890 said: “On farms, Auld Hansel-Monday, where it is kept, is the great winter holiday of the year. Outdoor and indoor servants have a complete escape from bondage for the day'.
Villagers were usually woken up by young residents kicking tin pans through the streets to mark the beginning of the day. Breakfast was fat
brose, made from beef fat poured on oatmeal, with bonfires lit after the first meal of the day.
On January 6, 1870, the Perthshire Advertiser noted the celebrations of Handsel Monday - described as the 'holiday-in-chief' of the year - in Auchterarder. It was marked with 'much noise and boisterous mirths', wherein 'Boys, carrying flambeans, began to perambulate the town shortly after 12 o’clock and from that hour till morning the streets resounded with their hideous noise'. Pubs drew large crowds and people were 'well fortified within' as workers shrugged off their daily life and indeed 'went rightly daft'.
Changes to calendars, holidays celebrated, indulged or forbidden, by religious or economical 'overlords', appear across cultures, as do intercalary days to regulate or manage them. How these have accrued associations in Scotland is a layered and multi cultural affair, with some ancient traditions appearing to persist despite efforts by the 'great and good' to curtail them.
Some of this can be attributed to an earlier Greory than the one we associate with calendars. What became known as Christmas was integrated, in a very deliberate way and in accordance with instruction from Pope Gregory I, with earlier pagan midwinter or solstitial ritual and practice, echoes of which we see in the traditions of the daft days.
During Gregory's papacy (CE 590-604), the church successfully promoted extensive missionary activity among the pagan tribes of Europe. An aspect of how this was perceived, by Gregory, the church and later historians, was that the pathway from old Rome to the emerging European Middle Ages was maintained by the papacy when all other institutions were perceived as failing or having failed. Gregory is seen as having sensed that the future lay with bringing the word, the Church and its organisational structures, from the east to the tribes of Western Europe.
As barbarian hordes enetered the former Roman provinces, only the Church, through its bishops, claimed and represented civil and spiritual control or power. The Church became perceived as a binding force, confronting paganism whilst appearing to maintain social stability.
Through the efforts of monasteries, education continued and links to the past, of Empire and of Church in lockstep, were preserved. Gregory relied healy on these monasteries and utilised their monks to convert pagan barbarians.
Benedictine monks, led by Augustine, were sent to convert the pagans of the British isles. Although Gregory is widely perceived as rooting out paganism and suppressing localised superstitious practices across Europe, he appears to have been more circumpsect in relation to the obdurate traditions and rituals of these lands.
In a letter to Augustine, Gregory ordered the destruction of idols but not of the temples where people gathered to worship. Instead, re-purposing them, wherein they 'should be sprinkled with holy water', with altars and relics placed in their sanctuaries completing their conversion into churches, became the tactic.
Likewise the persistence of pagan rituals and places associated with them resulted in Gregory condoning continued observance of festivals. His letter instructed Augusatine not to outlaw them but to instead tie their meaning to 'good fellowship and consuming food', according to the Church's perception, 'not as sacrifices to demons, but for the glory of God'.
This laid the foundations for an amalgam of pagan and Christian traditions into what became known as Yuletide or Christmas. Much later changes to calendars, as noted above, served only to blur any perceived lines further.
It should be noted that Eastern churches did not adopt the Gregorian calendar and still follow the Julian calandar to mark feasts or holidays. Despite differences in calendrical observation, both traditions observe a 40-day Christmas to Candlemas, or Epiphany, season, which ends on 2nd February. The difference between Twelfth Night (after Christmas) and this later date accounts for superstitions and observances around luck for a new year depending on removing decorations on either and no other days before or in between.
Various efforts have been made over time, by the Church, notably in the so called 'Gelasian Sacramentary', compiled between CE 628 and 731, so relatively shortly after the papacy of Gregory I and perhaps as an embracing of methods which enjoyed perceived success during it, to equate the practices and rituals of Candlemas with the ancient Roman pagan festivals of Lupercalia and Feralia. The earliest written reference to Epiphany and Candlemas, as a cognate Christian celebration, was in CE 361, by Ammianus Marcellinus, who lists it as a double feast.
Many of the traditions and ritual observance since associated with them echo earlier pagan traditions of purification and rebirth (chalking of the door, house blessings, consuming cake, winter swimming), some of which have seemingly drifted culturally to different points in the Christmas to Candlemas season.
It is worth noting that, given the focus here on perception gaps and gaps in calendrical time/intercalary days, that what is referred to by some as the 'daft days' ending on Twelfth Night, as traditionally being on the feast day of Jan 6th, or Epiphany (said to celebrate the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles, represented by the visit of the Magi, or 'wise men') is likely to only be a Christian tradition. Even within this, since 1970, in some Western countries, the date of Jan 6th has become the first Sunday after Jan 1st.
Eastern churches, which are still following the Julian calendar, observe the feast on what, according to the Gregorian calendar, is January 19th, because of the current 13 day difference between the two calendars. Neither take account of 'dropped' days and months, intercalary days, weeks or months observed previous to them.
Nor is it possible to peel away the cultural layers to associate persisting practice rooted in more ancient pagan traditions with any particualr date in our current calendars, so effective have been the Church's cultural manipulations over time. Accounting for the 'in between time' of intercalary days, across cultures, echoed in Scottish traditions associated with this time of year, which are not the property of the Church but of those who practise them, and their perceptions of time, just as noted at the outset of this blog and reflected in the world events around us...
...mibby the daft days are no done yet.
(Next up, in pt2, is it even possible to account for how we perceive time anyway?)