Winter warmer... burning of the Viking boat at the end of Edinburgh's torchlight procession. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA
When Guardian writer Iain Aitch took up morris dancing, he asked his fellow dancers about the meaning behind all their stick-banging and hankie-shaking. Their answer was vague. Perhaps it was some kind of fertility ritual, perhaps not. The truth was buried in the mists of time.
You could ask the same question of the thousands of people who make the annual torchlight procession through the streets of Edinburgh part of their Hogmanay routine and their answers would be similarly inconclusive. They'd put it down to some primal instinct compelling them to march down from the Royal Mile, along Princes Street and up to Calton Hill, bearing burning torches and pursuing a band of latter-day Vikings pushing a wooden boat.
Except, unlike morris dancing, this ancient Celtic tradition dates back all of a decade. It's a glorious event: the city centre illuminated by a river of fire as adults and children ramble peacefully through the streets. At the end of the route, they burn the boat and set off a tremendous display of fireworks. Then everyone goes home happy.
Yet the whole thing is a modern-day construct, designed not to renew interest in paganism and the occult, but to launch the city's four-day Hogmanay programme. Perhaps this is how all of our enduring traditions started off: someone had a novel idea and it just kind of caught on.
It means that when this parade of ordinary people snakes gently through the city, another group of ordinary people stops on the pavement to watch them. It's as if, simply by joining the procession, we acquire some special, quasi-religious status. Those of us brought up in the 1980s have to suppress the urge to shout, "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie" and come to terms with being on a march that is free of any obvious political meaning.
But, like the morris dancers and their fertility theories, we can't help looking for significance. We hunger to know the meaning of the enormous grass bear that erupts into flames once the Viking boat is alight at the top of Calton Hill. Theories abound that it's not a bear at all, but a mole, a beaver or a meerkat. A ritualistic chant of "burn the bear" goes up from a crowd in search of religious ecstasy. Then some wag sets up a shout of "torch the teddy".
But lo! As the bear/mole/beaver/meerkat creature dissolves in flames, its chest gives way to reveal a burning heart. And so it comes to pass that the legend of the burning bear of Hogmanay will be told by generation unto generation forever more.
