Hogmanay

Australians will be celebrating New Year’s Eve by staying up until midnight and letting off fireworks – or maybe just getting an early night and sleeping through it all.  It’s interesting to know that our Scottish cousins will be doing similar things, although there are some special traditional celebrations that might seem a little surprising to us. In Scotland, New Year’s Eve is known as Hogmanay, from the Scots language, or Oidhche Challain in Gaelic.  Many parts of Scotland, particularly the islands to the west and north, continued to use the Julian calendar for a century or more after the…