Yule, New Year, and Handsel Monday. A. Balfour in The Farmers’ Three Daughters (1822) tells us “The Daft Days”. . .were set apart for the meeting of friends and intimate neighbours, to dine or sup (often both) together, when good cheer, home-brewed, and hearty welcome, promoted the conviviality and rustic mirth of the company. For Sir Walter Scott, they were a time for tales of derring-do. He writes in Rob Roy (1818) of venturesome deeds and escapes, sic as folk tell ower at a winter-ingle in the daft days’.
Ushering in this festive period, the fourth Sunday of advent is Bonny Sunday, also known as Beainer-Sunday, or Ben(n)a-Sunday. These names, deriving from Old Norse and Old English, mean ‘Prayer-Sunday’. On this day, according to Thomas Edmonston in An Etymological Glossary of the Shetland and Orkney Dialect (1866), you hung up more than just your stocking at the fireplace. He describes Beainer-Sunday as the Sunday before Christmas, on which day it was usual to hang up an ox-head in the chimney, to make broth with. An earlier reference to the day comes from 1774 when G. Low asserts in A Tour through the Islands of Orkney and Shetland that Their Festivals are Christmas, Newyearsday [and] Bonny Sunday’.
A more recent quotation, from 1935, seems to suggest that by then the term was already dying out; when a Shetland informant told the editors of the Scottish National Dictionary: I have frequently heard the remark from some old person: “Folk, what tink ye, dis is Benna Sunday”. If an old person has to draw people’s attention to a day that was once a major festival, we must suppose that the day was no longer celebrated as such.