Boy, what a little bit of Scottish persistence will get you. Thirty years ago, Edinburgh’s New Year’s Day celebrations were a wee bit flat, as in DDOA (dull and dead on arrival). Some distressed revelers got together and decided to found the Hogmanay Festival, a mid-winter celebration loosely based on Celtic, Roman, pagan and any other available traditions. Hogmanay (possibly Gaelic for “new morning” or Anglo-Saxon for “new month”) itself dates back hundreds of years in Scotland as a mid-winter festival marked by fire-lighting ceremonies, giddy socializing and energetic toast-making.

Fast forward one generation and Hogmanay is now Scotland’s biggest, noisiest, most raucous New year’s Eve street party, shouting out its collective joy in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1996, Hogmanay drew 350,000 celebrants, about one out of every 11 people in Scotland. Because of the massive size of that crowd, Hogmanay has become a ticketed event, with organizers planning to distribute 180,000 tickets for this year’s event in Edinburgh.

Those in the know are aware that Edinburgh’s Hogmanay really starts just after Boxing Day on December 26. That’s when groups of reconnoitering partiers gather on Rose St. to inspect and habituate themselves to the many pubs that will form one of Hogmanay’s biggest party zones only a few nights thence.   

Another anomalous thing about Hogmanay is that its organizers politely, but firmly, insist that the 21^st century will begin at midnight on January 1, 2001. This puts the festival at odds with most of the rest of the world, which is convinced that there was a Year Zero. Being at odds with the rest of mankind is not an unusual state for the Scots to be in, and no doubt tens of thousands of them will make a toast to that fact come December 31, 2000. — Patrick Totty