Great Balls of Fire! (...sorry, I couldn't resist)

Happy new year!

There's an idea I've heard somewhere or another, that how you spend your New Year's Eve and/or Day is indicative of the whole year to come. It's not the sort of thing I would usually think about, and I'm certainly not thinking about it in a predictive way (not like, "You must do X on New Year's Eve, otherwise your entire year is doomed to be Y").

But there's something nice about thinking of a particularly lovely New Year's as setting a precedent, starting out the year as you mean to go on. In this case, I was in a new (and beautiful place), experiencing a new-to-me (and very Scottish) tradition, staying with friends and also meeting new people. Those seem to me very much the sorts of things I'd wish for my coming year.

(Along with a WHOLE LOT of global, political and societal change...but let's not even start talking about that. About five minutes before midnight, my other, American friend and I caught ourselves talking passionately about everything that was wrong with 2017 and realized that, while true and real, bemoaning it wasn't how we wanted to spend the final minutes of our year.)

Hogmanay! That's the Scottish word for New Year's Eve.

One of my grad school classmates (coursemates?) invited me and another friend from our program to spend New Year's in her town, Stonehaven, not far from Aberdeen.

Stonehaven is a picturesque little harbor town, which happens to have a longstanding and internationally famous New Year's tradition: at the stroke of midnight, 40 or 50 adults walk up and down the main street, swinging over their heads ENORMOUS FIREBALLS. They make the fireballs themselves, some of the fireball swingers have participated for years or decades, and my friend and her husband are among them.

It was SO COOL. First there was a drumming group, then a bagpipe band (playing clearly-beloved Scottish songs that the entire crowd sang along with), then came the fireball swingers. My wimpy point-and-shoot camera can't begin to do it justice, but here they are, processing up and down the street, swinging fire:

 

The tradition has been going on for well over 100 years at least, and probably a lot longer than that. It appears to stem from ancient fire ceremonies of burning the old and bad and things that are worn out or broken, making way for the new.

The fireballs are huge, and heavy. At the end, once the material inside the wire frame of the fireballs has burned away, they fling them into the harbor.

Rounding out the evening there were fireworks, right under the full moon:

In the morning we got up for...a 5k run in the park. (I didn't run, just watched.) My friend and her husband are super intense runners. Like, ultramarathon, think-nothing-of-a-race-that-takes-32-hours-to-complete runners. So doing a 5k first thing after staying up late for New Year's really was a walk in the park for them.

 

Then, we were just in time to catch a glimpse of the "Nippy Dip," where masses of people run into the cold water of the harbor. (Like a polar bear plunge...except that Scotland is comparatively not so very cold...)

 

We also walked up the brae (hill), for a beautiful view over the town. (Stonehaven is also right next to Dunnottar Castle, where I went before classes started, but we didn't walk that far this time.) Here's cozy Stonehaven, and its beautiful bay:

 We walked as far as the war memorial, perched atop Black Hill. The view from there is wonderful. Exactly, exactly my kind of landscape. I could look at this endlessly:

When we came back into town, we stopped by my friend's parents' house – I'd asked earlier if they do "first footing" and indeed they do! For good luck, the first person to enter your house in the new year should be a dark-haired man, bearing gifts. My friend's husband has dark hair, so he went into the house first, and gave his in-laws a bit of coal for their fire and some shortbread. 

While we were there, my friend's mother gave us fruitcake (actually referred to as Christmas cake, but it was what I would think of as "fruitcake"), and my friend's father gave us a dram of whisky. It was a very Scottish New Year's!