Bringing In the New Year: Home for the Holidays -, #4

By Kate Darroch

What a Hogmany! and what a New Year's Eve party! What's Lianna hiding behind her back?
Will our girls be able to save the day?  Christmas day, Hogmanay and After the Bells

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kate Darroch
• Release date: Dec 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781944690359

Kate Darroch

Enjoying a placid life in coastal Devon, Kate brings her love of reading Cozy Sleuths, her 30 years writing experience, and her knowledge of foreign climes, to writing her quirky Travel Cozies. Kate hopes her readers will find as much joy in Màiri Maguire Cozies as she finds in reading Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Ellery Queen Magazine, and Steve Higgs’ Patricia Fisher. The colossal sense of community in the hamlets of Devon took Kate back in spirit to the Glasgow of her childhood, and that's how Màiri was born. Màiri is a Scots Irish teacher whose hometown is Glasgow as it was in the 1970s, an era Kate fondly remembers. In Britain, the Seventies ushered in a time of huge ideological change. The world opened up and class barriers were vanishing. It was an exciting time to be a woman. Kate hopes to bring a sense of that excitement to you now, with a soupcon of women's lives during that epoch of upheaval, together with a little of the culture of Europe; all wrapped up in fun, frothy, fast paced Cozy Mysteries, with just enough clues and twists to keep you guessing until the end.  Kate believes that Reading should be a pleasure available to all, and so she is passionate about Accessibility. All her fiction is published in Large Print and Dyslexia Friendly editions, standard print, eBooks and audiobooks.

Book preview

Dedicated with a thousand thanks

to the many people who have helped me to write

Prequel to Bringing In The New Year:

Christmas in Glasgow

is available to you now as a Gifted read

Free download: https://bookhip.com/SVBWAGB

GLESGAE VERNACULAR:

Continuing to list the meanings of English as spoken in Glasgow 😊

coutering up: pampering; taking affectionate care of; looking after (a sick person)

manage: find a way somehow

big, as in big sister/brother: older sibling

wee: literally small. Multiple meanings, often a term of affection

puir: literally poor. Meaning unhappy, or unlucky, or injured in some way.

In general, the ui spelling corresponds to the English oo

poke: paper bag; or cone-shaped paper carrier; or a food container

staying with [person]: living in [person]’s home; living with [person]; house guest

be oor first foot: First Footing is a Scottish custom where you visit friends and relations as soon after The Bells (midnight) as possible, bearing the traditional gifts. The first person to cross your threshold after midnight is your first foot. A lucky first foot is a fair woman or a dark man or a child.

Hence the Glasgow tradition, at a Hogmanay party, of positioning a young child clutching the traditional gifts outside your front door a minute before The Bells. Immediately after, the child enters and gives the gifts, ensuring a prosperous year for the lucky people who live at the party location.

Each party guest requires a first foot at their own home too. It’s terribly unlucky to be your ain first foot that is, if someone who was in your home at the Bells, or any member of your own household (whether s/he was at home during The Bells or not) is the first person to cross your threshold after the Bells.

To avoid ill luck a person who was not present in your home at the Bells and who is not living with you must be the first to cross your threshold in the New Year; and for good luck must bring the right gifts also.

The fear that your friends/loved ones might suffer the indignity of being their ain first foot when they return home after the Hogmanay party, results in drunken partygoers careening all over Glasgow all night, with their children, knocking on doors in the small hours to bring luck for each other by crossing the threshold and giving the traditional gifts. It is not unusual to find householders coming from their ‘close’ in the middle of the night, anxiously looking for someone to be oor first foot.

Traditionally the gifts are: a twist of salt, silver (a coin), a lump of coal, bread, and tea.

Whisky is an acceptable (indeed a preferred) substitute for tea, oats for bread

close: roofed-over entrance passageway of a tenement

tenement: small block of flats (apartments), 2 flats on each floor; usually 3 floors,

may be 5

hirple: struggling to walk. Describes someone walking slowly and painfully because a victim of arthritis, or of having worn stiletto heels for too long that day, or who has had their foot