Hogmanay is, all the evidence tells us, more popular now than it has been for centuries; the Scottish countryside on New Year's Eve is as lively as it was when Rab Burns was kicking his heels with his Jean or with Mary Morrison or whomever was handy.
Hogmanay, the word, has intrigued lexicographers for a long time. The first gentleman to chance his arm in print about the word's origin was the formidable Calder, a staunch believer in the wrath of God, who wrote in 1694: "It is ordinary among the plebeians to go about from door to door upon New Year's Eve, crying Hagmana! a corrupted word from the Greek Hagla-mana, which signifies the holy month."
The word is of French origin. In the dialect of Normandy they had hoquinano and haguinelo, cries on New Year's Eve. In Caen, hoguillano was a New Year's gift.
It should be remembered that hogmanay also had this meaning in Scotland; children went around the houses begging and one of their rhymes was: "Hogmanay, trololay, Give us of your white bread and none of your grey, Get up an gie's our hogmanay."
It was Scotland's great gulsers' night in the old days. Many versions of their rhymes survive. One, from Burns's time, went: "Get up guideman an be na sweer, And deal your bread as lang's you're here; the day will come when you'll be dead, You'll neither care for meal nor bread."
Not all was fun and games on hogmanay. In western Scotland, Napier's Folk-lore (1779) tells us: "All household work was stopped, the yarn reeled and hanked, and wheel and reel put into an outhouse. The house itself was whitewashed and cleaned. A block of wood was put on the fire about ten p.m. so that it would be burning briskly before the household re tired to bed. The last thing done by those who possessed a cow or horse was to visit the byre or stable, and I have been told it was the practice with some, twenty years before my recollection, to say the Lord's Prayer during this visit."
Nothing much has changed. In parts of the North this is still done before the family goes back to the fire to wait for the first-footers and the guisers.
A happy new year to you . . . and a good hogmanay.