What’s Up With Singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve?
Every New Year’s Eve, a bunch of people all over the world get together and sing “Auld Lang Syne,” and until now I didn’t have a clue as to why.
It’s New Year’s Eve, which means there are a bunch of articles out there regarding that most perplexing of traditions, the singing of “Auld Lang Syne.” Today I Found Out explains how it became a New Year’s Eve staple: In 1929, Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadian Band performed at a New York hotel on New Year’s Eve, with the performance being broadcast on the radio twice. Between broadcasts, they played Scottish folk song “Auld Lang Syne,” which Lombardo had learned from Scottish immigrants in Ontario, as a transition between shows—right around midnight.
There were other instances of the song being sung on New Year’s Eve, as far back as the mid-19th century, but this is the point at which it started being played at midnight every year on the radio and then TV. So what does the songmean? The title translates literally to “old long since,” or figuratively to “times gone by” or “times long past.” Dave Tomar attempts to explain its meaning on the Huffington Post: It’s “about the endurance of friendship, about cherishing the past even as we look to the future, and quite honestly, about knocking back a few drinks.” (Some of the lines: “And surely you’ll buy your pint-jug! / And surely I’ll buy mine! / And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, / For long, long ago.”)
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Professor Mike
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Here is to you all. May the coming year, and those after be enormously better than the one that just past. Here is to me in hopes that last year was just a really bad nightmare and Sarah Palin, the dude from Texas and the one from Utah do not really exist. But, if they do may a blight of laryngitis be upon them and a pox be upon the extreme right wingers.
I’ll drink to that!
With far too many old loved ones gone, I’ll drink a toast to my new friends here. May the new year bring us each peace!
You a Brit too. Shameful shameful.
LOL! Yes I have been accused of being shameful from time to time, but not so much lately. 🙂 🙂
“Hic!”
LOL…I hear ya man. Happy New Year!