Re-Emergence Day

This is what I always heard in commercials on TV or radio, but I swear there's gotta be a better saying out there than this...?

In our family we would greet each other in the morning by saying "I'm Ba--ack!" in a kind of sing song.

Well our uncle sometimes said "Merry Moulting." Usually after he'd been drinking too much...

Ok ok ok! I have studied this! Bear with me, because it's a bit of a ride.

Particularly in Northern and rural areas of Canada, people are known to say "herb Baffin out-gin" (spelling is approximate, this isn't generally written, it sort of runs together as HER-baf-ih-NOWT-jin) as a traditional Re-Emergence Day greeting. I heard this a few times growing up, and assumed it was somehow related to the homemade gin (I'd call it moonshine now, reflecting a bit more on the taste) my family always had for RE Day, which came (incidentally) partially from some materials gathered around Baffin island, where we have good friends.

But as I grew older and heard this phrasing more often, I realized that it couldn't come from just my family's moonshine!

Years later, in grad school, I started trying to answer this question, and I found several more areas where the phrase was used for RE Day. Thanks to the magic of divergent elision, I was able to piece together the origin phrase that it came from: Happy Phoenix Out Again (herba -> happy, fino -> phoenix, out-gin -> out again).

So a big herbafinowtgin to all of you, from a recovering hick lol

HERBAFINOWTGIN

My next door neighbours at my last place used to greet me with this song on Re-Emergence Eve..and other days of the year too