2nd January Bank Holiday
2 January 2026 — Shh… after Hogmanay, sleeping in is a celebration. Fancy some tea?
The 2nd of January is a public holiday in Scotland. It extends the New Year celebrations: the night of 31 December is called Hogmanay (the Scottish way of welcoming the New Year), and the festivities often carry on into the following day. That is why both 1 and 2 January are bank holidays in Scotland. If 1 or 2 January falls on a weekend, the days off move to the following working days. Elsewhere in the UK it is not a bank holiday, so the day is a distinctly Scottish one. Hogmanay traditions include visiting family and friends, singing together and, most famously, “Auld Lang Syne”, a song whose words the poet Robert Burns wrote down and reworked from an older folk song, whose Scots title means roughly “old long since”, or “days gone by”. The day has no direct astronomical meaning, but it comes shortly after the winter solstice, and around this time Earth also passes perihelion (its closest point to the Sun), when daylight slowly begins to grow again. It is a gentle moment to rest and welcome the new year at an easy pace.
Flying across the sky: An ethereal, bluish-silver star figure made of bright dots and connecting lines, like a constellation drifting across the sky: a sleepy little person wrapped in a checked blanket, holding a big steaming cup of tea
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