The county town calls its New Year’s Eve celebrations “First Night”. That’s odd! Surely it is the last night of the year.

Is the night of 1 January to be counted locally as the second night of 2007? Odder and odder. This space advocates correcting the “First Night” misnomer. Could it not be called something else?

How about “Welcome to Last Night”? But, then, some people, arriving on Broadway to celebrate, might think they were 24 hours late.

Whether or no, these are the last days of the year. Count them: 28, 29, 30, 31.

It shouldn’t, as they say, take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

One remembers when these Christmas days after Christmas Day seemed like time-out from reality. They were a part of the year in which no day seemed like any particular day of the week.

There was no school. Even Dad was around the house, free from his routine of business and community involvement. Mum, who knew how to organise a house for Christmas if anyone alive had the knowledge, wasn’t baking or wrapping.

There was time to read all those gift books and each day brought visitors – my mother’s “Club Girls” (old school friends whose December meeting was in Christmas week), our aunts, uncles and cousins, most of whom lived within a few miles, and fewer kilometres, of us.

Dad had four sisters and Mum had three sisters and two brothers. Each had a spouse and family. The cousins were not really my favourite people but their comings and goings made life interesting.

Nowadays, I pay seasonal visits to others but few enter my door in these last days. Even my cleaning lady doesn’t come until next week.

That’s why one remembers fondly those days-out-of-time between Christmas and the New Year.

I once wondered how any year could age, as in cartoons, so quickly from an infant in nappies to a bearded old man in a mere twelve months. Now the wonder is that the person I see in the mirror has morphed so soon from the kid who got his first electric razor for Christmas into that fellow who is really too old to be me.

A friend tells me that, pace Shakespeare, there are three ages of man. In the first you believe in Santa Claus. In the second you don’t believe in Santa Claus. In the third you are Santa Claus.

But I find that, in spite of a few disadvantages that are none of your concern, Act III is almost as good as Act I.

Oh yes, about these last four days of December. Since this is the 28th, I begin my reflections there.

There were renewed preparations in our house since the next day was my parents’ wedding anniversary. The outnumbered Anglicans in our mainly Presbyterian family reminded us that the day was once called “Childermas”, the commemoration of the Holy Innocents, the male children said to have been murdered by the ruthless King Herod, the Roman puppet ruler of Judaea. The magi en route to Bethlehem had consulted him in Jerusalem about the birth of a child destined to be a king but, wisely, they took an alternative way home without reporting what they had found.

Why, I used to wonder, did he not send armed guards with them, ostensibly to guide and protect them? I still leave that question to Biblical critics. Those critics, remember, are not endemically negative people. The Greek word kritkos simply means an expert who is qualified to comment.

The 29th had been chosen by the A.P.s (‘ancient parents’ we called them although they had married in their early 20s) because relatives from the West would be in Toronto for Christmas.

It was also the day, as T.S. Eliot’s play and the 1952 film reminds us, on which in 1170 Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by knights who thought they were doing the will of King Henry II. And they probably were.

That event was, perhaps, the basis of a question and answer at their 50th anniversary party at the Old Mill. Asked if either of them had ever considered divorce, Dad said, “Murder once or twice but never divorce”. I have heard that reply from many other married people since. Back then we laughed.

Through many of their 61 married years Mother and Dad held open house either at 31 Oakmount Road or 10 Southway Road on the afternoon and evening of the 29th. Esther, the regular ‘help’, was supplemented by caterers and the house was full of guests until 1200 hours.

There was no need for designated drivers. If there was ever an alcoholic beverage in that home I didn’t see it. Mulled sweet cider, tea and coffee were the drinks on offer.

The next day, the 30th, was a ‘nuclear family’ day. There was a rather formal breakfast in the dining room, a day outdoors and in the evening we went to see the most popular film of the day. It was long before the time of home entertainment centres.

In her 1968 journal, the late Barbara Castle, British politician and diarist, complained that she always felt ‘muzzy’ going back to work after the Christmas/New Year holiday. The word needs greater currency. The OED defines it as ‘dull, spiritless, mentally hazy’ and in some cases as feeling the worse for over-indulgence.

Has any Canadian writer used the word? Stephen Leacock, perhaps. He, by the way, would be 127 years old next Sunday. Let’s hope that “Sunshine Sketches” fans are not too muzzy to celebrate our great humourist’s birthday.

On 31/12 we see “the skirts of the departing year”, said Charles Lamb. Worth “Googling” is Tennyson’s poem, “Ring out, wild bells”, his farewell to and hope for the parting and incoming years.

At midnight on the 31st we used to open our doors to hear the bells and whistles that in Toronto of that time welcomed New Year’s Day.

Some in our extended family still thought it good luck to have a dark-haired visitor ‘first-foot’ across the threshold.

For better or for worse, that Scottish Hogmanay custom died in my parents’ time, as so many other traditions are threatened in ours.