Up Helly Aa actually “Up Holy [Day] All” can allude to any of twelve fire celebrations held every year from January to March in Shetland, Scotland, to stamp the finish of the yule season.
Every celebration includes a torchlit parade by crews of costumed members (known as guizers) that comes full circle in the consuming of Viking kitchen.
The fundamental celebration held in Lerwick, Shetland’s capital, includes a parade of up to a thousand guizers who walk through the boulevards of Lerwick on the last Tuesday in January. Since its commencement, ladies and young ladies have been prohibited from taking part as guizers in the Lerwick celebration. This has become a disputable issue and is the subject of progressing banter in Shetland.
The current Lerwick festivity became out of the more established yule custom of tar barrelling which occurred at Christmas and New Year just as Up Helly Aa. Crews of youngsters would drag barrels of consuming town on sledges, making wickedness.
Worry over open security and levels of inebriation prompted an adjustment in the festivals and saw them drawing motivation from the islands’ Viking history. After the annulment of tar barrelling around 1874–1880, consent was inevitably gotten for light parades.
The primary yule light parade occurred in 1876. The principal light festival on Up Helly Aa Day occurred in 1881. The next year the torchlit parade was altogether improved and standardized through a solicitation by a Lerwick community body to hold another Up Helly Aa light parade for the visit of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.
The Lerwick Up-Helly Aa was first settled by the Total Abstinence Society during the 1870s to give the youngsters who might some way or another beverage themselves senseless something to do. The name itself gets from Upholiday, the marsh Scots’ statement for Twelfth Day, and was brought by them to the Shetland Islands in the nineteenth century.
