If the Martians ever land, it will take them about 20 minutes to realise that tartan + bagpipes + whisky = Highland Scottish. No other national group or culture has such global brand recognition. But that’s just the Highlands, and ignores the larger and historically more important Lowland culture. However, if they arrive around the end of December, they’ll soon get the picture that the world looks to the whole of Scotland for the celebration of New Year.
So why does Scotland have this reputation of celebrating the Old Year’s end and the New Year’s beginning? One reason is that Scotland has celebrated New Year on the 1st of January since 1600, but for the next 152 years, the rest of Britain and the British Empire started the New Year on 25th of March.
Of course, the celebration of the winter solstice is common to many peoples. The Romans had their Saturnalia from 17th to 23rd December in the Julian calendar (possibly why the early Christian Church chose that time of year to set the birth of Jesus, although there is no biblical authority for it). The Norse celebrated Yule, which later contributed to the “Twelve Days of Christmas”, or the “Daft Days” as they were sometimes known in Scotland, and included a ceremony of troll-banning. The Gaelic celebration of Samhain (pronounced Sah-Wane) contributed customs too. In post-Reformation Scotland, we always found Christmas not really suitable for a festival – possibly either “too Papist” (Roman Catholic) or because there was a Calvinist dislike of frivolity on the day Our Lord’s birth was observed, and “too much fun”. Christmas wasn’t much observed in Scotland (except by Roman Catholics and Episcopalians) until fairly recently, and wasn’t even a public holiday until 1958.
As a child in the 1950s, I remember Christmas as being important to my English grandfather, but not to my Scottish grandfather’s family. For whatever reason, on the 17th December 1599, King James VI, via an act of the Privy Council, disjoined Scotland from the New Year date of 25th March, as kept in England, in order that Scotland should come into line with other “well governit commonwealths”. That was far enough from Christian Christmas for the Kirk not to be able to accuse anyone of having a good time only a holy day, so the celebrations of Hogmanay stuck. That didn’t stop the Presbyterians disapproving about Hogmanay itself for the next 400 years.
These “well governit commonwealths” that James VI was referring to included (with date of adoption of 1st January):

• Holy Roman Empire (Germany) 1544 (except Prussia)
• Spain, Portugal, Poland 1556
• Denmark, Sweden, Prussia 1559
• France (Edict of Roussillon) 1564
• Southern Netherlands 1576
• Lorraine 1579
• Dutch Republic 1583
• Scotland 1600

So we were quite late, really. But Russia held out until 1725 and Great Britain, Ireland and the British Empire (including America) until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
I have often wondered if James VI was merely enshrining in Scots Law the dates on which his mother and grandmother were used to celebrating the New Year, 1st January, ever since the Edict of Roussillon of 1564. Also, the 25th of March was Lady Day (the feast of the Annunciation to Mary that she would have Jesus nine months later), which may also have felt a bit too “Romish” for Presbyterian tastes. This was nothing to do with the Gregorian calendar, by the way. Scotland also used the Julian calendar until 1752. But since 1600 until then, there was a disjuncture as to what year we were in between 1st January and 24th March. When you see a date presented like “1619/1620” that indicates it was within those three months, and while still 1619 south of the border until 25 March, it was already1620 above it in Scotland. This was despite the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and even the Union of Parliaments in 1707. (Incidentally, we still have a hangover of this in the UK tax year which begins on April 6 – which is March 25 plus the 12 “lost days” from the Julian calendrical change-over.)
Many Hogmanay customs I remember as a child seem to have fallen by the wayside – first-footing with a beribboned herring and a piece of coal (for food and fire); ensuring that a tall, dark man is first across your threshold after the stroke of midnight; giving visitors and well-wishers a dram and a piece of black bun (a sort of rich cake in pastry); serving steak pie as New Year’s Day dinner; “saining” the house by sprinkling water and fumigating by burning juniper branches.
Nowadays, people tend to congregate in large-scale organised events such as the massive all-night outdoor celebrations in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Stirling, Inverness and, of course, Edinburgh, still the venue of the world’s largest Hogmanay party (but not in Covid-haunted 2021). For some reason, a Viking longship gets burned during Edinburgh’s celebrations, even though Scotland’s capital city has no historical connection whatsoever with the Norse invaders. In Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, the people come out in their thousands to watch 42 people swing fireballs as they process along the town’s High Street. Last year, as usual, we and our neighbours congregated around a bonfire on the beach outside our houses and watched the fireworks set off at midnight from Edinburgh Castle, 4 miles away. I would show you a picture of that, but my camera hand was quite shaky for some reason...
As for the derivation of the word Hogmanay itself, scholars have been debating since the late-1600s whether it is originally Scots, Norse, Gaelic, French, or Scots via French – although it’s worth noting a Latin record of the word as hagnonayse as early as 1443, in Yorkshire, England. The earliest record I can find in Scotland is in the Atholl Manuscripts (of the family of Atholl at Blair Castle) in 1696: “I passed on of his shillings to two poor women I brought up to my chamber yester-night to heare them sing a hog ma nae song”. Linguistic scholars have largely settled on the North-ern French dialogue word hoginane, from 16th Century French aguillanneuf, a gift given at the New Year (l'an neuf), and borrowed around the 1560s and the time of Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots. So who knows? What is clear, is that the Scots introduced the idea of New Year as 31st December/1st January to the English-speaking world, and everyone else since has bought into our Scottish love of a good party!

You may wonder where the practice comes from of crossing and linking hands while singing Auld Lang Syne.
It originates in the Masonic tradition of ending a Lodge meeting with a linked-hands and singing - called a "circle of unity" or "chain of union".
Burns wrote the words of Auld Lang Syne from fragments of earlier folk songs in 1788. The tune did not appear alongside the song until after his death in 1796. The first recorded example of this at a Burns Supper was at an Ayrshire lodge in 1879. But the practice also gained some traction in the USA - there are reports from the 1850s of the song's use at American college graduations. This popularity in America, long with its Scots origin, may be why in 1877 Alexander Graham Bell used it as a demonstration of the telephone, and it was one of the first songs recorded on Emil Berliner's new-fangled gramophone in 1890. About the same time, the singing of the song at New Year emerged among Scots gathering outside St Paul's Cathedral in London, and others living abroad. By 1929, the New Year tradition was so well entrenched that lines from the song were displayed on the electronic ticker in Times Square, New York.
So, this may well be another "ancient Scottish tradition" actually brought to its full flowering in America and re-imported to Scotland, as were modern Games and Gatherings. The real mystery is why people wear kilts and tartans at Burns Suppers, while Robert Burns himself would not have been caught dead wearing either.
And, for the record, the verses end with "For Auld Lang Syne".
Anyone heard singing "For the sake of Auld Lang Syne" will be taken out and shot!