what are your hogmanay traditions?

[madmacs]

Stuck in a very rural part of the midwest, new year tends to pass largely unoticed nowadays, or maybe I'm just getting old...

The NE Scotland traditons for me generally involved heading to the pub at about 7pm, several hours drinking until walking down to the harbour to get their about 11:30 (this tended to involve passing more pubs, and well...), the bakers tended to open up and make a killing selling hot butteries, pies, soup etc to the massed throng...

Come midnight the fireballs procession started down the high street...

http://stonehavenfireballs.co.uk/about

For more details... Of course when I was there the safety barriers werent there and it was a case of dodging the flames as you tried to cross the street to say happy new year to friends on the other side of the street.

Of you fancy watching, there's a webcam set up on the clock tower that tibes a prime vantage point...

http://stonehavenfireballs.co.uk/firecam

After that it was a cas of onto the first footing... The first foot was the first person to cross the threshold after midnight, and tradition has it that if it's a tall, dark, handsome, stranger, (having 3 out of 4 does make you popular all along the walk home) you'd have good luck for the coming year

The walk home tended to involve a "lets go here next" type of affair with pretty much any house with lights on having an open door and a welcoming hearth... All the more so if you had the traditional lump of coal and a bottle if something strong (about the only time I had whisky, well that and another bottle of something else... ) Needless to say the group of merry makers got smaller and smaller as people peeled off at their destinations...

Eventual getting home time tended to be something between 5am and 10am, just in time for a nice fried breakfast, or possibly ANOTHER fried breakfast as the case may have been...

A couple of hours kip, and time for new years day lunch, followed by the big new years day movie on terrestrial tv (this was in the days of only 4 tv channels of course, waaaaay before satellite)

So what traditions do/did you have?

Oh and number of kilts you were likely to encounter... 1or 2... People didnt really like flames near their nice wool kilts... The 1 or 2 would likely have been at parties in some of the hotels...