New Year's Eve/Hogmanay commemorates the solar divinity, Hogmagog. Traditional festivities include dressing in hides and horns of animals - "guising" - burning smoking sticks (Hogmanays) to ward off evil sprites and eating special cakes. At the moment of the New Year, doors are opened and utensils rattled to drive off the last psychic vestiges of the old year and welcome the new.
Get up, good wife, and shake your feathers,
And dinna think that we are beggars;
For we are bairns come out to play,
Get up and gie' us our Hogmanay.