New Year’s Eve is the party we don’t need but can’t get rid of. The location varies according to geography. City-dwellers gather in public squares and cheer at midnight as the skyrockets explode overhead and add more fumes to the blanket of urban smog. In the countryside, revellers meet in freezing farmhouse kitchens and drink bathtub gin while grumbling mutinously about soaring taxes and declining freedoms.

Compared with Christmas Day, the procedure is maddeningly vague. There are no special dishes or designated drinks

In Britain, the festivities have a distinctly Caledonian flavour. Hogmanay is a Scots word of uncertain origin. The theme tune, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, means something like ‘past time’ or ‘time long since.’ Robbie Burns wrote the lyrics and everyone promptly forgot them – apart from the opening line. For obscure reasons, the anthem is sung by revellers holding their arms across their chests and grasping the hands of both their neighbours to create a circle of unbroken contact. This eccentric rite is never taught, discussed or explained to anyone. And yet everyone knows how to do it.

We have nothing specific to celebrate on 31 December. It’s a funeral that becomes a birthday at the stroke of midnight. One year ends and another begins. And everyone is 12 months closer to being dead – which is hardly good news. The inventive Chinese name each year after a cuddly creature or a mythological beast but we westerners use four digits,........

© The Spectator