New Year: out with the old, in with the new?

How a song can help shape how we look forwards and backwards

Hello!

This time between Christmas and New Year is traditionally all about bidding farewell to the old year and welcoming the new, unless you’re in a Christmas-induced fog, in which case you might not be sure what day it is.

When you delve a little bit deeper into New Year traditions, it’s clear that most are to do with banishing the bad spirits that accumulate throughout the year, a much darker take on the whole New Year thing, and probably why you sometimes might get the urge to look over your shoulder.

Loud noises and firecrackers, the symbolic cleansing of your home just before midnight, the hanging of onions on doors, and the burning at midnight of effigies representing the bits of the past year you didn’t like? Just some examples of things we do to ward off those bad vibes, leaving the path clear, I suppose, for a new lot to accumulate once the next year starts.

But there there’s a gentler and more musical way to deal with all this, which is where Auld Lang Syne comes in.

With words from the Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1799 (although it’s thought he didn’t write all of it), and with music based on a traditional tune, Auld Lang Syne has come to be the song to sing at midnight. Translated from the Scottish dialect it means "old long since" or "days gone by."

It’s a more positive way to kiss the new year goodbye and say hello to the new. It’s about bidding old friends farewell while making sure they’re not forgotten, and even as you look forward to new beginnings.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?

And those bad spirits? Well, maybe there’s something to be said for killing them with kindness instead of firecrackers, joining arms instead of taking them up. And instead of raising hell, raising your glass in a toast to both the year about to finish, including the good and the bad, and the year about to begin.

We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet
For the sake of Auld Lang Syne