It is the night before New Year’s Eve and I am looking forward to our traditional family gathering during which we feast and play games and feast some more. I hope that everyone reading this has plans to ring in the new year in their own special way.
Someone asked me about New Year’s traditions as they pertain to Ireland and Scotland and that requires some explaining. Irish historian Kevin Danaher has made a convincing argument that the four agricultural holidays of Imbolc, Beltaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain are likely the indigenous Irish seasonal festivals assimilated by the immigrating Celts and spread to Scotland and other areas where they were celebrated1. Ronald Hutton concurs pointing out that the stories of the Ulster cycle “do not mention any midwinter feast at all, but emphasize those at the beginning of the seasons.”2
It is basically accepted that various cultures including Romanized Celts and the Norse brought the midwinter celebrations with them, which were eventually assimilated into the Christian customs of Ireland and the British Isles.
Two Roman festivals occurred near the solstice. Kalandae, the feastival honoring the new year held from January 1st to January 3rd, was the older of the two. January 1st was declared the official start of the year in 153 BCE. Saturnalia, was a feast decreed by the emperor Aurelian, in 274 CE beginning first on the 17th of December and lasting several days. These feasts signified sort of the opening and closing of the midwinter celebrations and spread throughout the empire.
Both celebrations included feasting and libations while the Kalandae festival was distinctive from the Saturnalia merrymaking because gifts were exchanged at this time. Gift giving on the New Year rather than Christmas continued to be the case through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the UK, with New Year’s gifts being the norm rather than Christmas gifts. In Wales the New Year’s celebration/gift is actually called Calennig
According to Hutton, December 25th was the date that Caesar’s official calendar marked the winter solstice and the first day of Saturnalia in later years. It was chosen by the early church as the date to celebrate Christmas for this reason.
The Council of Tours was more successful assimilating Saturnalia as Christmas, than they were at replacing the Kalandae festival with the feast of Epiphany. People held fast to their New Year celebrations and eventually the church conceded the battle and pronounced January 1st the feast of Christ’s circumcision.
This succession of feast days from Christmas to Epiphany eventually settled into the celebration of the 12 days of Christmas as it was recognized all through the medieval era3. All sorts of local customs and traditions were assimilated or developed over the centuries. There’s no such thing as a uniform cultural practice and discovering the differences is what I like most about historical research.
This was eventually one of the reasons that Protestants broke with the Catholic church. They believed that Popery was fully of heathen elements and practices that were disrespectful to Christianity. In 1583 the Kirk (Church of Scotland) excommunicated people who celebrated Yule and in 1640 parliament made it illegal. That was repealed in 1712, but it was still strongly discouraged. Christmas wasn’t a bank holiday until 1871. This is one way that Scottish tradition is very different than Irish tradition where Catholicism won out.
The Wassail Bowl
Although originally associated with 12th Night, wassailing became associated with the New Year celebration during the time when the celebration of Christmas was discourages by Protestant legislation. The word “wassail” is actually a toast and wassailing was the act of toasting the health of your friends with spiced ale. You can find “modern” wassail and lambswool receipts in Richard Cook‘s Oxford Night Caps. I recommend downloading this booklet and experimenting with the recipes. They are a lot of fun.
Hogmanay First-Footers
New Year’s Eve is called Hogmanay in Scotland. No one’s really sure how it started or why, so of course you will read of it’s “pagan” origins. I find that unlikely given the fact that the first reference to the celebration was supposedly in1604. I did an extensive search and couldn’t find anything written about it before the 19th century.
The most reasonable origin story I have read of Hogmanay proposed it might have been a religious effort to dissuade Popery and its heathenish Christmas practices, when legislation failed. Hogmanay and New Year’s definitely became the most important winter holiday in Scotland.
One Hogmanay tradition was that of ciad-chuairt (first-foot) where people wandered the community bringing gifts that were supposed to bring good luck for the coming year to the household they set first-foot in on New Year’s Day.
Het Pint is a traditional Scottish Hogmanay drink which was carried around by the first-footers in toddy kettles and passed around in cupfuls. Atholl Brose is another Scottish drink. I am not as certain that it is truly a traditional New Year’s Drink but we drink it warm and so it fits for me.
Het Pint
2 quarts ale
1 teaspoon nutmeg
½ cup honey, golden syrup or simple syrup
3 large eggs
1 cup Scotch whisky
In a large pan combine the ale and nutmeg and heat through. Add sucanat/honey and stir until dissolved. In another bowl mix the eggs and pour 3/4 hot ale mixture into the eggs beating to blend well. Stir this into the hot ale mixture in the saucepan beating until warm and then stir in the Scotch whisky
Atholl Brose
I’ve run across a lot of really complicated recipes for adding oatmeal to the drink when it really sounds to me like what is being used is a nice thick homemade oatmilk so I simplified the recipe I have to the following recipe:
1 cup of oatmilk
1 cup of honey (traditionally this would have been heather so I like to use wildflower)
2 ½ cup Scotch whisky
1 cup light cream
Warm your oatmilk over very low heat, so that it is just warm enough to add the honey and dissolve it. Gradually add whisky and stir until it is mixed in well. Stir in the cream and remove from heat. Vegans can use golden syrup or simple syrup in place of the honey.
Hot Buttered Rum
One of our newer favorites for toasting in the New Year is hot buttered rum which is just a nice variation on the hot toddy. I’ve played with this recipe a bit. Most of your traditional hot buttered rum recipes call for boiling water which I have replaced with hot cider. I can’t claim I came up with the idea myself as I saw it on a blog somewhere, but I am very particular about my mulling spices.
Starting by making some mulled apple cider. I use a modern teaball to hold the mulling spices rather than bothering with tying it up in linen. I place 7 black peppercorns, 6 whole cloves, 6 coriander seeds, 6 allspice berries, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon chips and some dried orange zest. If I have bits of nutmeg that are left from grinding, I add those too.
Making the mulled cider is easy. Just pour a half gallon of cider into a sauce pan and add the tea ball. Since this is going to have some rum added in, I like to float a few oranges on top, too. I’ve never understood spiking them with cloves because the cloves never get down into the liquid. While this is simmering on the stove-top make the rum batter by mixing the following ingredients:
1 cup softened butter
¼- ½ cup sucanat or honey
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon mace
4-5 threads of saffron (special holiday treat)
To make hot buttered rum you simply add 1-2 oz of rum to a cup and top it off with the steaming cider. Top this with a dollop of the rum batter and a dash of cream and stir it around until it melts. You can add whisky in the place of the rum and maybe even mull some hard cider if you are having a grown up only affair. The nice part is that the kids and folks who don’t imbibe, can share in the tradition by partaking of only the mulled cider and the batter.
This is the appropriate time to go off on a tangent because it occurs to me that these traditions are little alcohol laden. One question I ponder frequently is how they managed to stay remotely healthy with all of the alcohol in their diet?
The answer is multi-faceted. To begin with alcohol intake is exaggerated. Drunkenness was still frowned up in polite society. The ale they drank was most frequently small ale which was not much more potent than our NA beers are modernly. Wine was often diluted, especially when given to children. Cordials were often mixed with syrups and hydrosols which cut back on their potency.
When I was looking into it, I also found something interesting about saturated fats and alcohol consumption. In addition to keeping you warm when you are out in the cold, saturated fats mitigate the damage that alcohol has on your liver. It has been being studied as a means of reducing alcohol induced liver disease for awhile now.
I found a few studies on the subject one concluding that a “diet enriched in saturated but not unsaturated fatty acids reversed alcoholic liver injury.” The effect was attributed to the down-regulation of lipid peroxidation.4 This study has been backed up by a more recent study which concluded that “formation of triglyceride-enriched lipid droplets and induction of autophagy are protective mechanisms against fatty acid-induced lipotoxicity”5 This may be attributed to the fact that ingesting saturated fat increases the production of a hormone called adiponectin which triggers a hepatic signaling pathway resulting in hepatoprotective effect. 6
So there you have a brief, and possibly yawn-inducing, foray into the scientific defense of boozing it up with some of these drinks during the holiday season. I hope you enjoy them.
References:
- Danaher, K. (1982). Irish Folk Tradition and the Celtic Calendar. In R. O. Ed., The Celtic Consciousness (pp. 217-242). New York: George Braziller Inc. ↩︎
- Hutton, R. (1996). Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: UK: Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- Dowden, J. (1910). The church year and kalendar . Cambridge: Cambridge, The University press . ↩︎
- Nanji AA, S. S. (1995). Dietary saturated fatty acids: a novel treatment for alcoholic liver disease. Gastroenterology, 547-554. ↩︎
- Mei S, N. H. (2011). Differential roles of unsaturated and saturated fatty acids on autophagy and apoptosis in hepatocytes. Journal of Pharmocology and Experimental therapeutics, 487-498. ↩︎
- You M, C. R. (2005). Role of adiponectin in the protective action of dietary saturated fat against alcoholic fatty liver in mice. Hepatology, 568-577. ↩︎
Domestic Medicine 
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