HANDSEL
New on the blog—why is a New Year gift called a “handsel”?
A very Happy New Year, everyone! Ah, 2017 already. Let’s try and forget about how soul-crushingly terrible 2016 was and focus on making the year ahead a lot better. And with that in mind, here’s a pointless fact.
2,017 is a prime number. The last year to be a prime number was 2011. And (in mathematical parlance, at least) pairs of prime numbers that are six places apart like these are known as sexy primes.
Sexy primes—which take their name from the Latin for “six”, sex, before you imagine anything else—aren’t all that rare mathematically. In fact, by the time you count to 20, you’ll already have come across 5 and 11, 7 and 13, 11 and 17, and 13 and 19. But they’re an interesting mathematical quirk all the same, and if knowing that this year is officially a “sexy prime” doesn’t start your 2017 off in the right way, frankly what will?
That utterly pointless fact then, is our New Year handsel to you.
The word handsel cropped up on the HH Twitter feed yesterday, defined as “a New Year gift, given to wish good luck for the year ahead”. In that specific sense, it dates back to the late fourteenth century, but it was in use long before then as a much more general word for a gift or presentation, or merely the act of handing something over to someone else. It derives from two fairly straightforward roots: hand, a word that has remained all but unchanged since the Old English period, and selen, an Old English word meaning “gift” or “donation” (and which is a none-too-distant cousin of the verb sell).
Although its earliest meaning was fairly vague, it didn’t take too long for more specific uses of the word to develop. By the early thirteenth century, handsel was being used to refer to omens and signs—literal “gifts” from above, signalling something momentous is destined to occur. Doing something “for good handsel” referred to superstitious practices carried out to ensure good fortune; oppositely, something that seemed ominous or inauspicious would likewise be dubbed “bad” or “ill handsel”. And it’s from there that the tradition of bestowing a gift on someone to ensure that good luck went with them—in particular at momentous times of the year—that the New Year’s handsel eventually emerged.
Not that that is the end of the story, of course. As the word handsel continued to be passed down from century to century, it picked up a host of related meanings referring to debuts and beginnings, and in particular those that might give you an idea of things to come. In that sense, a handsel can also be the first instalment of a payment or bond; a gift given at the start of a new job or new life stage; the first use of something newly bought or acquired; the first fruits of someone’s labour; a morning’s earnings or takings; and even the first customer or sale made by a business after opening in the morning.
And, of course, the first blogpost of the New Year.
