The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31256, 31 December 1966, Page 5

The People's Songbag

FIRST-FOOTING

(Specially written ]or "The Press” by DERRICK ROONEY.) T’ONIGHT is hogmanay, the A last night of the year, and at midnight many people will be joining to sing “Auld Lang Syne” before setting out to uphold the old tradition of first-footing. First-footers by definition are the first people to cross the threshold in the New Year, and it is customary for the owner of the house to regale them with food and drink. The drinking part is about all that survives of the ritual these days; the New Zealand New Year’s Eve is a fairly colourless affair com-

pared with the elaborate ceremony it was in the past .

In Deerness, in Orkney, it used to be the custom for old and young to assemble in a great band for a round of visits, knocking on every door and being admitted only after singing a song appropriate to the occasion. In every house there would be a long table groaning with food, and copious quantities of ale; how the first-footers managed to consume so many huge suppers and so much ale remains a mystery.

In the Highlands, parties would gather in one of the larger farmhouses, and one of the party would get a dried cowhide, which he would drag behind him around the house. The rest would follow, beating the hide with sticks and shouting: Hug man a'. Yellow bap, Beat the skin. Spit in her two eyes. Spit in her stomach. Hug man a’. After traversing the house three times the party would halt at the door and each member utter an extempore rhyme extolling the hospitality of the owners; afterwards they would be regaled with bread, butter, cheese and whisky. Before the party left one member would burn the breast part of a sheep-skin and put it to the nose of everyone as a charm against witchcraft and illness.

Even the children got in the act on hogmanay. Early in the morning they would be out in the streets, swaddled in sheets and moving from door to door in bands. At each door they would cry: Hogmanay. Trollolay, Give us your white bread, and none of your gray. Whereupon they would be given a dole of oat-cakes—-which, like the day,' were called hogmanay. “It is no unpleasing scene, during the forenoon, 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," wrote Robert Chambers in “Popular Rhymes of Scotland” early in the last century. “Such a mass of oaten alms is no Inconsiderable addition to the comfort of the poor man’s household and tends to make the season still more worthy of its jocund title.”