New Year’s Day is the most depressing of holidays. It doesn’t celebrate anyone or anything worth celebrating. It simply marks the passage from one year to the next, something so predictable and uninteresting that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Yet people see it as a great opportunity to start again, to turn over a new leaf, to make times better and happier than before. It’s an odd moment in which to be optimistic, when the winter is deepening and the debts incurred over Christmas are waiting to be paid. But nothing stops millions from greeting this non-event with wine and song and gaiety as the clock strikes midnight.
New Year’s Eve is celebrated around the world, but in these islands it is especially associated with Scotland, where Hogmanay, as the Scots call it, has always been feasted with great fervour. The Scots may have focused on New Year to compensate for the Presbyterian Church’s refusal to take part in the celebration of Christmas, which it used to regard as a Catholic superstition, but we can’t any longer think about New Year without bagpipes and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and heavy drinking.
It was in Scotland that my dislike of New Year’s Eve began.
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