A newlywed's Christmas in Scotland

’Tis the season for Christmas-themed articles, and my editors have hinted that I should write about “Christmas in Scotland.” This just goes to show how sentimental Canadians are about Scotland, since in reality Christmas festivities were frowned on by the Scots Protestant population from about 1550 to 1950. For 400 years, Christmas was seen by most Scots as a suspiciously Catholic thing, and why American design magazines wrap their Christmas trees in Stewart tartan ribbon is anyone’s guess.

My guess is Queen Victoria, who celebrated Christmas at Balmoral Castle with great publicity and lashings of German Christmas customs, both to develop her cult and to make the Prince Consort feel less homesick for his native land. The big Scottish holiday is actually Hogmanay, the Gaelic New Year’s Eve, when one goes out and gets uproariously drunk outside Edinburgh Castle instead of in the comfort of one’s own home. Its origins are pagan, not Catholic, and therefore believed safe for all.

My first Christmas in Scotland was my first Christmas ever away from mom and dad. On Christmas morning homesickness hit me like a stocking full of coal when I could not remember how to make my mother’s annual Christmas morning bun. Already exhausted from a very bad cold, midnight Mass, the struggle to get home after midnight Mass and weeks of copying my mother’s Christmas baking schedule, I threw a most un-festive temper tantrum on the kitchen floor.

My only-child husband fled to Christmas Day Mass, and I dragged myself into the sitting room to string popcorn and cranberries while watching Noddy Holder’s Top Christmas Rock Video Countdown on TV. Never in my life had I spent a Christmas morning in front of the TV, and all I can say is that I never want to hear “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” ever again. Every single recorded version of that overrated song made it onto Noddy’s List. Truly, the chief joy of Noddy’s Countdown was seeing how young and wholesome George Michael once looked.

Until the bun moment, though, Christmas in Scotland was a cheerful affair. Making up for the lack of indigenous Christmas customs, a German Christmas market set up shop in central Edinburgh, providing Scots and tourists with carnival rides, foodstuffs and gift ideas. The supermarkets were crowded with traditional English Christmas food: suet puddings, fruitcake, mince tarts, chipolata sausages wrapped in bacon. There were signs everywhere proclaiming “Happy Christmas” or (if made also for the American market) “Merry Christmas.” The garden centre in the corner of the park in which we live gave Mark our Christmas tree free with the purchase of a Christmas tree stand. We carried it romantically home through snowy woods and manhandled it up four flights of 17th-century stairs.

On Christmas Eve we picked our way through the snow to a bus stop and met the rest of my husband’s small chant-and-polyphony choir in a pub on seedy Lothian Road while Young Scotland, excited by the rare treat of snow, fired snowballs at buses and passing cars. The choir drank beer; feeling my head-cold gather in size and strength, I sipped whiskey and hot water.  And at last we made our frozen way on foot to church, paused to admire the Snowpope — complete with papal tiara — in the parking lot and went indoors to discover that there was no heat.

“Hodie scietis, quia veniet Dominus, et salvabit nos” sang the choir: this day you will know that the Lord will come and save us. And this was true on several levels, including the immediate one of Mass ending before anyone died of hypothermia.  I don’t remember going home; I may have been partly delirious. It was only family pride that got me out of bed to attempt the Christmas bun.

Christmas joy returned on Christmas evening when, through the miracle of modern technology, most of my family appeared live on my computer screen to wish us a merry Christmas and thank us for their Christmas presents. And so it was in very good spirits that Mark and I trudged across the fields to an even older house for Christmas dinner. Our host had prepared two roast geese, the traditional English Christmas bird, and our hostess had laid out Christmas crackers and Christmas gifts for all. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a family Christmas dinner, but the hospitality was an enormous comfort to me, thousands of kilometres from home.

This year, however, we will not be going to the neighbours. This year, my parents, one of my brothers and one of my sisters are coming to spend Christmas with us. And so this year I expect to have a very merry family Christmas indeed. I shall warn everyone to wear thermal underwear to midnight Mass, and my mother shall make the bun.