I went for a walk with some friends last night and one of the things we were talking about was the moon, which was nearly full and very bright. One of my companions suggested that there should be an adjective similar to sunny to describe such a night. He came up with moony, and I couldn’t think of anything better – can you?
I’ve since discovered that full moons have different names in different months. A December full moon like the one tonight, for example, is known as the oak moon in the medieval English calendar, as the cold moon in the Celtic calendar, as the peach moon by the Choctaw, as the snow moon by the Cherokee, and as the bitter moon by the Chinese. More moon names.
By the way, the title of this post is the Scots for ‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night’ and comes from a song by Sir Harry Lauder called Wee Deoch an Doris, which you can hear here. Deoch an Doris comes from the Scottish Gaelic expression ‘deoch an dorais’ – lit. ‘drink of the door’, which means ‘one for the road’ or ‘the parting glass’.
