Christmas Special: Highland Yule Traditions

Stories of Scotland

Annie and Jenny

History, Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.8 • 728 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Annie and Jenny take a festive Yuletide jaunt around Christmas time traditions in Scotland. We take a look at the almost completely lost highland tradition of the Clach an Groait stone, the world famous Orkney Ba tournament, and an old lady and her festive pig. This time of year is dark and cold, but these historic tales will warm your toes by the peat fire with kindness and generosity. For the wheelbarrow Christmas theiving and Clach an Groait lore, we read the Inverness Courier from 1843. For the Christmas pig oral history, listen here: www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/178Stories of Scotland is a multi-award winning Scottish history podcast, proudly recorded in Inverness in the Highlands. We research our heritage and mythology podcast using archives, books, museum objects, and oral histories from across Scotland. You can support Stories of Scotland on Patreon!www.patreon.com/storiesofscotland Get bonus content on Patreon

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Stories of Scotland, a jolly podcast about Scottish history and folklore.
0:16.3	Filled with festive cheer, I'm Annie.
0:19.2	And sliding on down the chimney, it's me, Jenny.
0:22.8	And welcome to our Christmas special, a happy, light-hearted exploration of ancient
0:28.1	yuletide traditions.
0:30.0	I love this time of year, Annie.
0:32.0	We've just passed the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice.
0:36.2	And we're getting ready for our Yuletide
0:38.6	feast, or Chrissy-Christy-Krissy Dindens, as some of us like to call it.
0:43.7	And you do love your Chrissy-Christy-Krissy Dindens, Jenny. Honestly, in 2020, I've been living
0:48.9	for this Chrissy-Christy Dindens, I'm not going to lie. You can take all the freedoms you want, Nicholas Sturgeon, but you're not taking my pigs in blanket.
0:55.2	What are you having for your Christmas dinner journey? We traditionally have a ham on Christmas Eve and then a turkey on Christmas Day with lots of Brussels sprouts.
1:03.6	Wow, that's a proper Yuletite feast. We are having our mushroom Wellington.
1:15.6	Which is less traditional, but much more vegetarian.
1:23.0	But whether it meets or veggies, Yuletide is the period of celebrations from late December to early January, which the north of Scotland has celebrated for centuries. If you were celebrating Christmas
1:30.1	in Scotland a couple of hundred years ago, you would be calling it Yule. Now, Yule traditions come from
1:36.5	a variety of different sources, but the name Yule itself comes from the Vikings, who celebrated this
1:42.7	time of view with huge feasts. In Old Norst,
1:46.2	Yol means feast. They toasted the rebirth of the sun, fertility and successful harvests in the
1:53.1	year to come, and of course, peace. However, for centuries in Scotland, you weren't supposed to be
2:00.5	celebrating Yule.
2:02.2	You see, the Presbyterian Reformation of Scotland in 1560 viewed Christmas, are Yule celebrations,
	...

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