Old Years Eve

As a northerner I was brought up to celebrate Old Years Night aka Hogmanay, aka First Footing, aka New Years Eve.
As the children celebrated the birth of Christ at Christmas, so the adults celebrated the birth of a New Year.
This was not for your home alone, but for that of all your friends and neighbours and 10 to 20 homes would be represented by the group formed and on leaving the pub, club or your home if you had stayed in, you would pass along to each others homes, where refreshments would have been prepared and one from the party would enter first, usually with a chunk of coal, a bottle of whisky and some rum butter and wearing gloves.
The Whisky for Health
Coal for a Comfortable Home
The Rum Butter for Fertility
and the Gloves as a sign of prosperity.
On moving to Peterborough in 1999, I found a place which had on the whole never heard of anything other than Hogmanay or New Years eve and thought it just entailed getting drunk, letting off fireworks anytime after midnight and staying at the pub as long as they would serve drinks, or sit at home getting drunk and often being legless before midnight.
and then we wonder where community spirit has gone.
For more info you could try out
Hogmanay

Enjoy the seeing out of the old and the coming in of the new and may 2009 bring you and yours, Health and Happiness if not the wealth.
Love and Wishes
Barry