31 Quirky Scottish Christmas Facts
Discover some weird and wonderful Scottish Christmas Facts! How many did you know?
Find out where in Scotland celebrates Christmas and New Year a week late, who gives a herring in a dress as a Christmas gift, and what the old (and rather peculiar) Scots word for a turkey is, and more!
1. Robert Louis Stevenson, gave someone a very unusual Christmas present – his birthday! Just three years before his death in 1894, Stevenson learned that the daughter of Henry Clay Ide, the US commissioner to Samoa and his personal friend, was upset with the timing of her own Christmas day birthday. He wrote to twelve-year-old Annie Ide enclosing a mock legal document that transferred his November 13 birthday to her. He said that he had no further use for it and he believed that she would make a much better day of it.
2. If you’re always leaving your festive shopping to the last minute, maybe you should move to the island of Foula in Shetland. Christmas here is celebrated two weeks after everyone else! The tiny community of around 30 people still adhere to the Julian calendar which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46BC. Their Christmas is January 6 and their New Year, January 13.
3. Whilst the invention of Christmas cards is generally attributed to an Englishman John Calcott Horsely, who designed them in 1843, he was actually pipped to the Christmas post by Charles Drummond of Leith, who sent New Year greeting cards to people in 1841. They proved so popular that the notion of sending seasonal cards took off. The concept really blossomed with the invention of the adhesive stamp – another Scottish gift to the world, courtesy of James Chalmers of Dundee.
4. A man from Ayrshire had to be hospitalised after eating too many Brussels sprouts at Christmas in 2011. The traditional vegetable contain lots of vitamin K which promotes blood clotting. However, this counteracted the effect of anticoagulants the man was taking for a heart problem. Doctors were baffled at first but eventually realised that too many sprouts were to blame. Thankfully, the man’s condition stabilised after the diagnosis.
5. Andrew Carnegie the Scottish self-made steel tycoon and his multi millionaire friend, John D. Rockefeller sent each other joke Christmas presents. Rockefeller sent Carnegie a cheap cardboard waistcoat to make fun of his poor childhood. In return, Carnegie sent a fine whisky to Rockefeller, a devout Baptist and teetotal.
6. Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebrations were the site of the Guinness World Record for the largest Strip The Willow dance. 1,914 people danced Strip The Willow at the ‘Night Afore Fiesta’ on 30 December 2000.
7. The steak pie became the national New Year’s dinner dish in Scotland because New Year’s Day was not traditionally taken as a holiday. Families were too busy to cook and bought big steak pies from their local butcher instead. In 2014, bakers, Malcolm Allan made a record 200,000 pies just for Hogmanay. Stacked one on top of the other, they’d measure 1,237 times the height of the Kelpies!
8. Santa may come from the North Pole, but the world’s first department store Santa was a Scot. James Edgar was an Edinburgh-born emigrant who owned a department store in Massachusetts. He never forgot his own humble beginnings and every Saturday morning he would stand on the roof of the store and throw pennies to the local children. At Christmas 1890, he decided to dress up as Father Christmas and walk around his store handing out gifts. After his first appearance word soon spread and families would flock to see him, coming from as far away as New York. Demand was such that he had to hire another person to share the role with him. The following year hundreds of stores across America copied his idea and installed their own Santa.
9. No Rodeo Drive Christmas shopping for Oscar winning actress, Tilda Swinton. Instead, she loves knitting her friends and family long scarves made from alpaca wool from a farm near her home in Morayshire.
10. Comedian Billy Connolly is the celebrity that most Scots would like to eat, drink and be merry with at Christmas according to a YouGov poll. The Big Yin received 44% of votes. Andy Murray, Lorraine Kelly and Ewan McGregor were also high up on the guest wish list.
11. Sir Alex Ferguson once launched his own brand of Christmas tree! In 2015, fans could order the artificial Ferguson Fir or ‘Firgie’ for around £70 from Christmas Tree World in Wigan.
12. Tina Sergbine from Fife hit the headlines when it was discovered that she could wrap a Christmas present in under a minute – and she wraps well over a thousand during the festive period. Tina was an Amazon super-wrapper. She got through 4-5 rolls of sticky tape every day. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do house calls.
13. Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Billy Joel, Boney M, Rod Stewart and Prince have all recorded versions of Auld Lang Syne.
14. In Dundee until the mid 1970s the traditional first foot gift was a herring wearing a dress! The fish could be bought at stalls in town and the fancier the frock, the better with many wearing crinolines or dressed as brides. The herring was then hung above the front door where it was meant to remain until the following year.
15. Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class, who has yet to earn his wings in the Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life was a Scot! The part was played by stage actor, Henry Travis, a doctor’s son from Berwick-on-Tweed.
16. Edinburgh zoo was the inspiration for John Lewis’s famous Monty the Penguin Christmas TV ad. The production team at agency, Adam & Eve/DDB spent a day at Edinburgh Zoo. During their visit they discussed the behaviour and movements of penguins with the keepers and also made short recordings which were used when developing CGI technology to create the realistic on-screen penguin characters. Although Monty and Mabel are Adélie penguins, they have the same behaviours and mannerisms as the Gentoo penguins at Edinburgh.
17. The idea of the monarch’s Christmas message was inspired by a Scot. Sir John Reith, from Stonehaven. In 1932, he persuaded the Queen’s grandfather, King George V to record a message for radio from a small office in Sandringham Palace. The microphones at the palace were connected by Post Office land lines to Broadcasting House. The King’s first speech was written by Rudyard Kipling.
18. On Boxing Day 1900, three lighthouse keepers disappeared without trace from the remote isle of Flannan. Relief staff found an untouched meal set out on the table, a toppled chair, two sets of oilskins and a starving canary – but no sign of the lighthouse keepers. Theories about their fate have included murder, ghosts and alien abduction. But the most commonly accepted idea is that the unlucky keepers were simply washed away by a wave.
19. In Blackadder Goes Forth, Stephen Fry’s character, General Melchett, has the full name of General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett.
20. A crew of 14 pyrotechnics at the Edinburgh Hogmanay celebrations walk around 105 miles setting up the fireworks at their positions on Calton Hill, West Princes Street Gardens and Edinburgh Castle. The display lasts 5 minutes but if each effect was fired individually it would last over 4 hours.
21. Trees play a big part in ancient Scottish New Year superstitions. Pieces from a rowan tree were placed over a door to bring good luck. Mistletoe was hung, not for kissing under but to prevent illness. Holly was placed to ward off mischievous fairies and pieces of hazel and yew were used to protect the house and those who lived in it. Finally, Juniper was burnt throughout the house and the doors opened to bring in fresh air. Only after all this was the house deemed ready for New Year.
22. Once upon a time, Edinburgh Zoo used unsold and donated Christmas trees as toys for some of their animals. The trees are like giant catnip for lions who like biting the trunk and chewing on the bark. Meerkats, sun bears and chimpanzees are also big fir fans
23. Auld Lang Syne is a song loved worldwide and not just for five minutes each year. The tune – with different lyrics – has been used as the national anthems of both the Maldives and South Korea. In Taiwan it’s used as a graduation and funeral song and in Japan it is known as “Glow of a Firefly” and is used to usher customers out of shops that are about to close. In Thailand it’s used at Boy Scout jamborees and in Holland it’s a Dutch football anthem.
24. Rangers and Celtic hold the British record football league attendance. 118, 567 fans squeezed into Ibrox Stadium on New Year’s Day in 1939 for a decisive Old Firm match, where Celtic won 6-2.
25. Most of Scotland might have chortled at the Scotch and Wry‘s Reverend I.M. Jolly in his traditional Hogmanay telly spot, but Rikki Fulton, the actor who played the part didn’t find the character funny and was always amazed when people laughed!
26. The Cairngorm Reindeer are the UK’s only free-ranging herd. Wild Reindeer used to roam Scotland until they were hunted to extinction in around 1200AD. They were re-introduced in the Cairngorms in 1952 by a Swedish reindeer herder called Mikel Utsi who visited the area on his honeymoon.
27. The New Year’s Day Loony Dook at South Queensferry started in 1986 when some locals jokingly suggested it as a cure for their Hogmanay hangovers!
28. In acknowledgement of their Viking heritage, Orkney receives not one, but two Christmas trees from Norway each year. They have their lights turned on in two separate ceremonies on December 6 and December 7.
29. Christmas was virtually banned in Scotland for around 400 years – from the end of the 17th century to the 1950s – and Christmas Day wasn’t even a Scottish public holiday until 1958! John Knox, the leader of the Presbyterian movement, banned the celebration of Christmas in Scotland in 1580. On 27 December 1583, five people in Glasgow were brought before the kirk session and sternly ordered to make public repentance for ‘keeping Yule’. During the Christmas of 1605, five Aberdonians were prosecuted for going through the town, ‘maskit and dancing with bellis’
30. An ancient traditional New Year ceremony would involve people dressing up in the hides of cattle and running around the village being hit by sticks. The festivities would also include the lighting of bonfires, rolling blazing tar barrels down the hill and tossing torches. Animal hide was also wrapped around sticks and ignited which produced a smoke that was believed to be very effective to ward off evil spirits. The smoking stick was also known as a Hogmanay.
31. The New Year staple, Shortbread has been attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots. In the mid-16th century, it was said that she was very fond of Petticoat Tails – a thin, crisp, buttery shortbread originally flavoured with caraway seeds.
31. The old Scottish name for a turkey is a bubbly jock. Some say it got this name because of the noises the bird makes but another suggestion is that it’s because the bird’s wattle or comb hangs over its beak and the bird looks like it has a permanently runny nose!
