Juniper's first article calls its protective burning ancient and widespread. One specific, named version of that practice survived in written record well enough to be reconstructed in detail, and it shows how a broad folk habit can also be a precise local rite with its own vocabulary.
Saining is the Scottish Highland new year custom, most fully recorded around Hogmanay, in which juniper smoke was carried by hand through the house and the byre, room by room and stall by stall, to purify both the family's living space and their livestock for the coming year. The rite had its own name, its own calendar date and its own understood purpose, distinguishing it from a vaguer, undocumented sense that "people used to burn juniper for luck."
Beyond Scotland, juniper's purifying role runs through documented use from ancient Egypt onward, but saining is unusual for how late and how precisely it was recorded: nineteenth and early twentieth century folklorists collected first-hand accounts of the custom from people who had performed it, rather than reconstructing it from archaeology or from a passing classical reference.
The berries carry an entirely separate modern life. Juniperus communis flavours gin, and both the drink's name and its flavour descend from the same word, Dutch jenever tracing to Latin juniperus, a use of the plant that shares nothing with saining beyond the tree it comes from.