As I write this, Fair Isle has been cut off from mainland Shetland for about ten days: no boats, no planes. In part this has been due to a festive break for the ferry and flight staff, but the weather has also done its bit, serving up a severe easterly gale that lasted several days, and which made off with my neighbours’ poly-tunnel, among other thing.
I was lucky. Having spent Christmas with my brother out in Shetland, I got home without any delays on the last flight to reach the island, on December 28th. Others are less fortunate though, and several people are stuck here this weekend, waiting patiently for a chance to get away, back home, back to work, and back to normality.
Unlike the last few days, the evening of the 31st December itself was beautiful – flat calm and cloudless skies; perfect weather for a Fair Isle New Year.
Throughout most of Shetland, New Year’s Eve (or, in some areas, Christmas Eve) has traditionally been a time for guizing, though Fair Isle is now one of the few places that still keeps up the custom. Essentially, guizing means dressing up in fancy dress or a disguise of some sort, or, in the most northerly isles of Shetland, a skekler’s suit, made entirely of straw. Guizers will go out during the evening, usually in ‘squads’, and visit their neighbours, performing a humorous sketch or act for them. The hosts must then try to guess who each guizer is, before offering them a drink, some food, and their best wishes for the New Year. Then it’s off to the next house.
The sketches usually revolve around some story from the past year, an island event, or local politics. The trick is to perform the act well while managing to keep your identity hidden. This year, three squads of adults were out guizing, plus a group of teenagers and one of younger children. We each had ten houses to visit during the night, so an early start was essential.
My own squad’s act was based around the extraordinary hat-making skills of Tommy Hyndman, our American neighbour, complete with a Harry Potter-style ‘sorting hat’ to help find new homes for islanders. I was Tommy, dressed in a set of his own clothes, which were surreptitiously smuggled out of his house earlier in the day by his wife. Despite what I thought was a reasonably convincing American accent (and a somewhat less convincing mask) I was guessed correctly in most houses. Tommy himself had the pleasure of watching my impersonation of him in our final house of the evening. He took it very well, and didn’t seem even slightly concerned as to how I had managed to obtain his clothes for the part.
Once guizing is finished, most people return to their own homes to see in the New Year with their family. Then, after midnight, one household will host a party, which everyone who hasn’t yet retired to bed will attend.
Christmas and New Year are a good time here in Fair Isle. It is perhaps the only time of the year when everybody can relax and take a break from work. People eat together and socialise most evenings with neighbours, friends and family. It is a time when the dark, the cold and the terrible weather seem much less important than the warmth and the light inside each house. It is easy to remember what these midwinter celebrations are really all about, and why they have always been so important.
Photos by Dave Wheeler
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