(Sean Connery is present.)

Robert Burns, author of Auld Lang Syne

(From Robert Chambers, A Book of Days, 1869)

NEW YEAR’S EVE, OR HOGMANAY

As a general statement, it may be asserted that neither the last evening of the old year nor the first day of the new one is much, observed in England as an occasion of festivity. In some parts of the country, indeed, and more especially in the northern counties, various social merry-makings take place; but for the most part, the great annual holiday-time is already past. Christmas Eve, Christmas-day, and St. Stephen’s or Boxing Day have absorbed almost entirely the tendencies and opportunities of the community at large in the direction of joviality and relaxation. Business and the ordinary routine of daily life have again been resumed; or, to apply to English habits the words of an old Scottish rhyme still current, but evidently belonging to the old times, anterior to the Reformation, when Christmas was the great popular festival:

Yule’s come and Yule ‘s gane,
And we hae feasted weel;
Sae Jock maun to his flail again,
And Jenny to her wheel.’

Whilst thus the inhabitants of South Britain are settling down again quietly to work after the festivities of the Christmas season, their fellow-subjects in the northern division of the island are only commencing their annual saturnalia, which, till recently, bore, in the license and boisterous merriment which used to prevail, a most unmistakable resemblance to its ancient pagan namesake. The epithet of the Daft [mad] Days, applied to the season of the New Year in Scotland, indicates very expressively the uproarious joviality which characterized the period in question. This exuberance of joyousness—which, it must be admitted, sometimes led to great excesses—has now much declined, but New-year’s Eve and New-year’s Day constitute still the great national holiday in Scotland. Under the 1st of January, we have already detailed the various revelries by which the New Year used to be ushered in, in Scotland. It now becomes our province to notice those ceremonies and customs which are appropriate to the last day of the year, or, as it is styled in Scotland, Hogmanay.

This last term has puzzled antiquaries even more than the word Yule, already adverted to; and what is of still greater consequence, has never yet received a perfectly satisfactory explanation. Some suppose it to be derived from two Greek words, άιαμηνη (the holy moon or month), and in reference to this theory it may be observed, that, in the north of England, the term used is Hagmenu, which does not seem, however, to be confined to the 31st of December, but denotes generally the period immediately preceding the New Year. Another hypothesis combines the word with another sung along with it in chorus, and asserts ‘Hogmanay, trollolay!’ to be a corruption of ‘Homma est né—Trois Bois lá” (‘A Man is born—Three Kings are there’), an allusion to the birth of our Saviour, and the visit to Bethlehem of the Wise Men, who were known in medieval times as the ‘Three Kings.’

But two additional conjectures seem much more plausible, and the reader may select for himself what he considers the most probable. One of these is, that the term under notice is derived from Hoggu-nott, Hogenat, or Hogg-night, the ancient Scandinavian name for the night preceding the feast of Yule, and so called in reference to the animals slaughtered on the occasion for sacrificial and festal purpose word hogg signifying to kill. The other derivation of Hogmanay is from ‘Au gui menez’ (‘To the mistletoe go’), or ”Au gui ľan neuf’ ‘ (‘To the mistletoe this New Year ‘), an allusion to the ancient Druidical ceremony of gathering that plant. In the patois of Touraine, in France, the word used is Aguilanneu; in Lower Normandy, and in Guernsey, poor persons and children used to solicit a contribution under the title of Hoguinanno or 0guinano; whilst in Spain the term, Aguinaldo, is employed to denote the presents made at the season of Christmas.

In country places in Scotland, and also in the more retired and primitive towns, it is still customary on the morning of the last day of the year, or Hogmanay, for the children of the poorer class of people to get themselves swaddled in a great sheet, doubled up in front, so as to form a vast pocket, and then to go along the streets in little bands, calling at the doors of the wealthier classes for an expected dole of oaten-bread. Each child gets one quadrant section of oat-cake (some-times, in the case of particular favourites, improved by an addition of cheese), and this is called their hogmanay. In expectation of the large demands thus made upon them, the housewives busy themselves for several days beforehand in preparing a suitable quantity of cakes. The children on coming to the door cry, ‘Hogmanay!’ which is in itself a sufficient announcement of their demands; but there are other exclamations which either are or might be used for the same purpose. One of these is:

‘Hogmanay, Trollolay,
Give us of your white bread, and none of your gray.’

And another favourite rhyme is:

Get up, goodwife, and shake your feathers,
And dinna think that we are beggars;
For we are bairns come out to play,
Get up and gie’s our hogmanay!’

The following is of a moralising character, though a good deal of a truism:

Get up, goodwife, and binna sweir,
And deal your bread to them that ‘s here;
For the time will come when ye’ll be dead,
And then ye’ll neither need ale nor bread.’

The most favourite of all, however, is more to the point than any of the foregoing :

My feet’s cauld, my shoon’s thin;
Gie’s my cakes, and let me rin!’

It is no unpleasing scene, during the forenoon, to see the children going laden home, each with his large apron bellying out before him, stuffed full of cakes, and perhaps scarcely able to waddle under the load. Such a mass of oaten alms is no inconsiderable addition to the comfort of the poor man’s household, and enables him to enjoy the New-year season as much as his richer neighbours.

In the primitive parish of Deerness, in Orkney, it was customary, in the beginning of the present century, for old and young of the common class of people to assemble in a great band upon the evening of the last day of the year, and commence a round of visits throughout the district. At every house they knocked at the door, and on being admitted, commenced singing, to a tune of its own, a song appropriate to the occasion. The following is what may be termed a restored version of this chant, the imagination having been called on to make up in several of the lines what was deficient in memory. The ‘Queen Mary’ alluded to is evidently the Virgin:

‘This night it is grid New’r E’en’s night,
We’re a’ here Queen Mary’s men;
And we ‘re come here to crave our right,
And that’s before our Lady.

The very first thing which we do crave,
We ‘re a’ here Queen Mary’s men;
A bonny white candle we must have,
And that’s before our Lady.

Goodwife, gae to your butter-ark,
And weigh us here ten mark.

Ten mark, ten pund,
Look that ye grip weel to the grund.
Goodwife, gae to your geelin vat,
And fetch us here a skeet o’ that.

Gang to your awmrie, gin ye please,
And bring frae there a yow-milk cheese.

And syne bring here a sharping-stane,
We’ll sharp our whittles ilka ane.

Ye’ll cut the cheese, and eke the round,
But aye take care ye cutna your thoom.

Gae fill the three-pint cog o’ ale,
The maut maun be aboon the meal.

We houp your ale is stark and stout,
For men to drink the auld year out.

Ye ken the weather’s snow and sleet,
Stir up the fire to warm our feet.

Our shoon’s made o’ mare’s skin,
Come open the door, and let’s in.’

The inner-door being opened, a tremendous rush was made ben the house. The inmates furnished a long table with all sorts of homely fare, and a hearty feast took place, followed by copious libations of ale, charged with all sorts of good-wishes. The party would then proceed to the next house, where a similar scene would be enacted. How they contrived to take so many suppers in one evening, heaven knows ! No slight could be more keenly felt by a Deerness farmer than to have his house passed over unvisited by the New-year singers.

The doings of the guisers or guizards (that is, masquers or mummers) form a conspicuous feature in the New-year proceedings throughout Scotland. The favourite night for this exhibition is Hogmanay, though the evenings of Christmas, New-year’s Day, and Handsel Monday, enjoy like-wise a privilege in this respect. Such of the boys as can lay any claim to the possession of a voice have, for weeks before, been poring over the collection of ‘excellent new songs,’ which lies like a bunch of rags in the window-sill; and being now able to screech up ‘Barbara Allan,’ or the ‘Wee cot-house and the wee kail-yardie,’ they determine upon enacting the part of guisers. For this purpose they don old shirts belonging to their fathers, and mount mitre-shaped casques of brown paper, possibly borrowed from the Abbot of Unreason; attached to this is a sheet of the same paper, which, falling down in front, covers and conceals the whole face, except where holes are made to let through the point of the nose, and afford sight to the eyes and breath to the mouth. Each vocal guiser is, like a knight of old, attended by a sort of humble squire, who assumes the habiliments of a girl, ‘with an old-woman’s cap and a broomstick, and is styled ‘Bessie: Bessie is equal in no respect, except that she shares fairly in the proceeds of the enterprise. She goes before her principal, opens all the doors at which he pleases to exert his singing powers; and busies herself, during the time of the song, in sweeping the floor with her broomstick, or in playing any other antics that she thinks may amuse the indwellers. The common reward of this entertainment is a halfpenny, but many churlish persons fall upon the unfortunate guisers, and beat them out of the house. Let such persons, however, keep a good watch upon their cabbage-gardens next Halloween!

The more important doings of the guisers are of a theatrical character. There is one rude and grotesque drama which they are accustomed to perform on each of the four above-mentioned nights; and which, in various fragments or versions, exists in every part of Lowland Scotland. The performers, who are never less than three, but sometimes as many as six, having dressed themselves, proceed in a band from house to house, generally contenting themselves with the kitchen for an arena; whither, in mansions presided over by the spirit of good-humour, the whole family will resort to witness the spectacle. Sir Walter Scott, who delighted to keep up old customs, and could condescend to simple things without losing genuine dignity, invariably had a set of guisers to perform this play before his family both at Ashestiel and Abbotsford. The drama in question bears a close resemblance, with sundry modifications, to that performed by the mummers in various parts of England, and of which we have already given a specimen.

Such are the leading features of the Hogmanay festivities in Scotland. A similar custom to that above detailed of children going about from house to house, singing the Hagmena chorus, and obtaining a dole of bread or cakes, prevails in Yorkshire and the north of England; but, as we have already mentioned, the last day of the year is not in the latter country, for the most part, invested with much peculiar distinction.

YouTube: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

Clearly undermining YouTube’s preferred political agenda violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.

The Truth About Guns:

The West Freeway Church of Christ videos and streams its services. The camera caught the moment when a hooded man stood up, pulled a shotgun and opened fire this morning.

Watch the man in black stand up at the top of the frame.

[T]his is a textbook version of a good guy with a gun taking down a bad guy with a shotgun. Even though we’ve been told by all the smartest people that the whole good guy thing is a myth.

Two people have reportedly been killed, including the shooter, and one person is in critical condition. But had the church not had armed individuals in the congregation and ready to respond, this could have been a far worse situation than it already was.

For that reason — because an armed individual used a firearm to stop a threat — look for this story to get far less intense or ongoing media attention than it otherwise would have.

———————————

The Tarrant county sheriff at press conference noted:

“Today evil walked boldly among us, let me remind you, good people raised up and stopped it before it got worse.”

Want your kid to grow up to be a doctor, or at least an orthodontist? Dominic Green gives an insider’s perspective on the Ashkenazi Jewish penchant for intellectual achievement.

There I was, watching my old VHS copy of The Boys from Brazil, idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbor’s kids when he wasn’t looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto I’ve been working on, when I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not ‘eugenics’, but ‘Bret Stephens’.

‘What’s he done now?’ I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.

In today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrecht’s excellent new history of the Jews in modern times. Lebrecht describes the unparalleled contributions of notorious underachievers like Marx, Freud, Heine, Disraeli, Herzl, Trotsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Einstein but, inexplicably, he fails to mention the contributions of members of the Green family — a lacuna that I, with my inherited Ashkenazi acumen, can already see him correcting in the paperback edition.

Lebrecht specifically does not attribute Jewish success to ‘Jewish DNA’. He attributes it to environmental factors: the Jewish tradition of Talmudic study, which produced near-universal adult literacy among Jewish males when most Europeans couldn’t even write ‘well-poisoner’ in blood; to the cultural imprint of intellectual labor even among secular Jews; to the Jewish emphasis on hard work, family and education; and to the perennial threat of violence, as nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of your neighbors burning you and your children alive in your home.

There is solid evidence for all these environmental factors, and plenty of evidence that similar factors apply to many other minorities. There is less solid evidence for genetic factors in Jewish achievement, and especially epigenetic factors (changes in gene expression in living organisms, presumably due to environmental factors). Bret Stephens summarizes all this by saying, ‘Jews are, or tend to be smart’.

This is not terribly smart. Perhaps it reflects the errors of compression that go into editing. The evidence that we have — and it would be interesting to have more — is that Jews aren’t much smarter than any other group. The difference is that they produce high-achieving intellectual outliers at a slightly higher rate. As in athletics, so in the life of the mind: the higher you get, the more marginal the advantages become.

Stephens also refers to a genetic study from 2005. This is an interesting study — you see, we read all the time. In particular, it challenges the ‘bottleneck theory’ (Ashkenazi genes were ‘bottlenecked’ in the early Middle Ages) and instead focuses on how ‘intelligence in heterozygotes’ are increased by the ‘well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster’. I want you to know that I understood that first time round, while making a pastrami sandwich. …

If you wish to avail yourself of the secrets of Jewish genius, there are two simple courses of action. One is to enlist your children at an early age in the study of the Talmud, and teach them the values of ethics, work and family, which are also the near-universal immigrant virtues. This will be demanding for both them and you: helping them with math homework will be a cinch by comparison.

The other option is to hire Jewish people who show marginal aptitude in their fields of specialization. This is the much less demanding course to take, and it is much more likely to lead to success in the long run. But it does mean refraining from chasing them out of the universities, the professions and the Democratic party. So, be smart like us.

RTWT

Da Yoopers Tourist Trap in Ishpeming, Michigan houses a World’s Record item…the world’s largest working rifle, which they have named “Big Ernie”.

It’s 35 feet long and weighs in at 400 pounds.

WMMQ.com

HT: Vanderleun.

Sometime around the turn of the last century, Civil War veteran H.O. Studley, who worked at the Poole Piano Factory in Boston, built himself a tool box, one helluva tool box.

My Modern Met:

Any good woodworker has a decent toolbox, but no one has ever created something as special as the Studley Tool Chest. This beauty is 20×40 inches when closed (40×40 inches when open) and contains 300 tools within its carefully crafted mahogany rosewood, ebony, and mother-of-pearl case. As interesting as the piece itself is, it has a long history, which at one point saw it displayed in the Smithsonian.

The tool chest was created by mason, carpenter, and piano maker H.O. Studley. Born in 1853 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Stanley enlisted in the Massachusetts infantry in 1861 and was held as a prisoner of war in Texas. While working as an organ and piano maker, sometime between 1890 and 1920, Studley devised his ingenious chest.

Designed to hold his own tools, as well as a collection of 19th-century hand tools, Studley worked diligently to craft an ingenious system that would pack everything into the relatively small space. Flip up trays, hidden compartments, and multiple layers conceal everything perfectly, like a well put together jig-saw puzzle. Each tool has its proper space, even clicking when pushed into place.

A work of art itself, the Studley Tool Chest is full of detail, with mother-of-pearl and ivory inlay that speaks to his career as a piano man. The mammoth piece weights 72 lbs when empty and 156 lbs when open, meaning a full squad is needed to move it.

Before dying in 1925, Studley passed this prize possession to a friend. Pete Hardwick, the friend’s grandson, held on to the chest and loaned it to the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American History in the late 1980s. It was later purchased by a private collector for an undisclosed sum, but if you imagine that just one tool in the set was appraised at $700 in 1993, it surely paid off for Hardwick. The current owner still occasionally lends it to the National Museum of American History.

The chest has become legendary in the woodworking community after being published on the cover of Fine Woodworking. The Massachusetts-based publication even printed a limited edition poster of the Studley Tool Chest, which promptly sold out. After many years out of print, the poster is again available for sale.

More photos.

Alison Krauss with Yo-Yo Ma.

Failed Kamikaze strike on HMS Sussex.

Tyler Grant, in the Spectator:

[T]he path forward is clear. Following the examination of the ‘evidence’ by a prosecutor, some Republican senator will rise to make a motion to dismiss. Chief Justice Roberts bound to Senate rules and eager to get back to his seat across the street where real lawyering happens, will call for a second, and there will be a floor vote, and the motion will carry. Alternatively, they’ll vote on the Articles after the close of evidence and both will fail.

The gavel will fall. Trump will remain in office. Democrats will mourn. Pollsters will poll and 2020 will be a nasty, nasty election that will strain the very fabric of our nation’s unified resolve and the parchment the Constitution is written on. There is some applicable wisdom from 1868 as Sen. James Grimes offered during the Johnson impeachment: ‘I cannot agree to destroy the harmonious working of the Constitution for the sake of getting rid of an unacceptable president.’ “

The democrats have gone absolutely crazy. Deciding that it’s a good idea to undertake one of the gravest constitutional procedures on the completely subjective conviction of their own righteousness and their rival and opponent’s villainy with no hope of convincing anyone or winning, and having so recklessly proceeded, ignoring the consequences and the damage they are inflicting on the system, they ended up congratulating themselves for reducing the Constitution’s ultimate check upon the Executive designed for use in the event of the most extreme kind of circumstances into a petty instrument for gratifying their demented radical base and expressing futile political spite. Their pet media is full of editorials explaining how wise and clever they are to have taken the ultimate sanction, meant to be invoked for high crimes like treason and bribery, and turned it into a spitball.

Québecois tenor Raoul Jobin with choir.