Midwinter solstice at the Clava Cairns, Scotland. Photograph © Julian Paren
The winter solstice arrives just before Christmas, on the 21/22 December. It marks the turning of the year and that same promise—the light will come back.
It’s an understanding humans have needed for thousands of years. If we want proof of that then it’s there in physical form in the layout of the many prehistoric stone circles in the Scottish Highlands and islands. A classic example sits on a terrace above the River Nairn near Inverness. About a mile south of the desolate Culloden battlefield, where Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army was famously routed in 1746, hidden in a grove of trees is the Clava Cairns. Viewers of the TV series Outlander will recognize their more recent rebranding as Craigh Na Dun. But they had already been standing there for the best part of four thousand years before that decisive April defeat of the Highland army.
Walking through the trees, you come upon the chambered tombs almost by surprise. The scale is almost shocking: the main cairn consists of a wide outer ring of stones more than twenty meters in diameter, encircling a central space five meters across. It’s impossible not to be struck by the atmosphere—the air seems still, untouched by the winds that sweep across Culloden moor from the nearby Moray Firth. The structures feel alien, almost as if they’d dropped from space.
Back in the Bronze Age, these stone tombs were painstakingly built by people who had no mechanical assistance and only rudimentary tools, a remarkable feat in itself. The circular cairns sit on a raised earth platform amid strategically placed standing stones, some almost three meters tall. The cairns themselves are aligned along a southwest/northeast axis; when the sun sets on the midwinter solstice, its rays shine down the passageway into the heart of the tomb itself and illuminate the back of the chamber. It’s an awesome feat.
And the builders didn’t just assemble the cairns from a random collection of stones. They were deliberately arranged not only in order of size but also by color. Towards the southwest, they chose red and pink sandstone. In the light of the setting sun at midwinter, they appear to glow red, the color intensifying till the sun sinks and they grow dark. Conversely, the stones on the opposite side, the northeast, have seams of quartz running through them. As the sun rises at midsummer, the first thing visible in the dawn light is the sparkle and glint of the quartz. It seems these seasonal events mattered back in the Bronze Age. They were reassurance, I suppose. With no other way of measuring time, those dramatic moments must have served to remind people of the change of seasons and the need to pay attention to the next phase of the year.
Christmas wasn’t that big a deal in Scotland in the 1950s. Before the Reformation of the church in 1560, Christmas had been a religious feast day. But the all-powerful puritanical Kirk insisted on turning its back on anything that reeked of Roman Catholicism, so the feasting was closed down. And in 1640, the Scottish Parliament passed a law to make the celebration of “Yule vacations” actively illegal. Even baking the popular spiced and fruited Yule bread was a criminal act.
In spite of the Restoration, when Charles II was returned to the throne and celebrating Christmas returned to the English calendar, it was still frowned upon in Scotland for a long time, which is why Hogmanay and New Year celebrations in Scotland became so important. Christmas was formally and informally banned for four hundred years—it was informally celebrated for decades, with church nativity services and Christmas trees, but it wasn’t made an official holiday in Scotland until 1958. I remember my dad having to work on Christmas Day right into the early 1960s, though he usually got the afternoon off.
As a child, I’d get one big present, a selection box of sweets that invariably contained at least one disappointing item (I dreaded the packet of Opal Fruits) and a stocking that included a wind-up toy of some description, a wee orange, and a florin. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, there would also be something pointless from my aunts—bath salts in fragrances that made me sneeze; insipid notelets so I could write a thank you for the gift itself or age-inappropriate soft toys that I’d surreptitiously regift to the next church sale.
We had to wait for my dad to come home before we could have Christmas dinner—the rare luxury of a whole roast chicken with Dad’s recipe sausage and oatmeal stuffing cooked in a separate baking tin, potatoes mashed and roasted, carrots, Brussel sprouts cooked till they were grey, and tinned peas. This feast was followed by the best bit—Christmas pudding with brandy custard. The pudding always contained silver threepennies wrapped in greaseproof paper. Finding one in your portion was supposed to guarantee good luck for an unspecified period. The coins had to be handed back, though—they were no longer legal tender and had to be saved for the New Year’s clootie dumpling, from which they’d be returned again for the next year’s birthday clooties. One memorable year, I gorged on so much Christmas pudding I spent Christmas night being violently sick in a basin.
That 1957 night in the town square, Santa had a grotto where you could pay to sit on his knee and get a present, but I preferred my own perch high on my dad’s shoulders. The air was filled with the smell of hot dogs and the tinny sound of Christmas carols and Bing Crosby roasting chestnuts. I could hear my dad’s braw tenor joining in. One object captivated me with what I now think of as its primitive charm. It was a glass-topped box, the size of a table football set. Inside, held prisoner in grooves cut in a sheet of plywood painted to resemble a heather moor with a distant castle, were a couple of dozen tiny plastic Scottish soldiers complete with bearskins and kilts, spats and red jackets, mostly with bagpipes but some with drums. When someone put a penny in the slot, they’d spring into limited life, moving back and forth while the speakers played a shrill rendition of “Scotland the Brave.” I don’t know why I loved it so but I did. I begged my dad for more and he gave in twice.
Hogmanay remains the signature Scottish festival in the eyes of the outside world. But the traditional New Year celebration only exists nowadays in the black and white line drawings of “The Broons” (in English, “the Browns”), a cartoon strip that has appeared in The Sunday Post since 1936. The extended family Broon have lived unchanged at 10 Glebe Street, Auchenshoogle, since then. They are possibly the last family in Scotland who cleave strictly to the Hogmanay traditions that were only just clinging on in my own childhood. For the rest of us, most of those customs have faded away.
On Auld Year’s Day, the last day of the year, the house had to be cleaned. My father, and most of the men and boys we knew, had their hair cut. We children were sent to bed for a nap in the afternoon so we could stay up to handsel in the new year. We all washed—bathed if we had a bath—and put on our best clothes. We’d gather in the living room as midnight approached, the TV on to make sure we didn’t miss the countdown to the bells. There was invariably something tartan-and-shortbread Scottish on the TV—the kilted dancers of the White Heather Club; Andy Stewart gurning “Donald, Where’s Your Troosers?," while my father grumbled that anyone who sang that flat shouldn’t be on the telly; Jimmy Shand and his accordion band playing “Bluebell Polka” while my grandfather reminded us yet again how he’d known Jimmy since they were young lads; Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar doing the proper Scottish songs; comedian Rikki Fulton satirizing Scottish Presbyterianism in the shape of the Reverend I. M. Jolly. I have no idea what the English were watching; it was absolutely a foreign country for one night of the year.
Glasses were charged—whisky for the men, sherry for the women (apart from Gran who liked an advocaat and lemonade with a glacé cherry), non-alcoholic ginger wine for the children, all ready for the toast. And then the countdown to midnight. We all chanted along with the TV and then it was “Happy New Year!” and glasses chinked all around. We embraced each other, wishing everyone in the room all the best for the coming year.
We sipped our drinks, gasping at the spiciness of the ginger wine, waiting eagerly to discover who would be our First Foot—a friend or neighbour knocking on the door, first across the threshold to bring the house good luck in the coming months. Tradition demanded they be dark and ideally handsome. Dark, allegedly because there was still a race memory of blond or red-haired Vikings, who definitely did not mean good luck. One year, I first-footed old friends. I was neither dark nor handsome enough, and I was blamed for every misfortune that befell them that year. I’m still not sure whether they were entirely joking.
Tradition also demanded that the First Foots had to bring their own bottle of whisky, which they’d pass around the room, having their own glasses filled in return with the hosts’ drink. They were also supposed to carry a lump of coal to symbolize fuel to get the household through the winter and something to eat, usually shortbread or the much-dreaded (in my view) black bun. The black bun is like a Garibaldi biscuit on steroids—a large pastry case filled with dried fruit and candied peel. All I remember of them from my childhood is an excess of currants that made it feel like chewing a mouthful of soil.
First Foots would come and go as the night passed. As the drink flowed, the grownups would take turns to deliver their party piece, songs and poems hefted to their individual performers. Heaven forfend a stranger should turn up and attempt a piece that “belonged” to another. I can still remember the glacial silence that greeted an interloper’s rendition of my father’s earmarked New Year special, “The Road and the Miles to Dundee.” Sometimes, if the room was big enough, there would be a chaotic attempt at Scottish country dancing; once, after a particularly violent Strip the Willow, I was literally bruised from shoulder to knee! But over the past thirty years or so, these traditions have ebbed away.
Val McDermid, the author of over thirty crime novels, is best known as a preeminent practitioner of “tartan noir.” Her most recent novel is Silent Bones. This post is drawn from her new memoir, Winter: The Story of a Season, to be published by Atlantic Monthly this January.
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