Do you have a favorite New Year’s Eve tradition?
Our family traditions consist of making a huge list of goals for the upcoming year and competing in our own Iron Chef competition with a secret ingredient. I love both of these traditions, but it’s always fun to shake things up a bit. So this year I hunted around the Internet to see how people from the around the world ring in the New Year.
According to Wikipedia, in Austria the radio and TV stations broadcast the midnight chime of the bell of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, followed by “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II.
In a reminder that the new year is for all creatures, not just humans, Belgian farmers make a point of wishing their animals a happy new year.
Those were fun traditions, but I found even better ones on that trusted news site, RyanSeacrest.com. Here were some of my favorite:
1. In Chile, people take chairs and tables to the graveyard to ring in the New Year with the deceased.
2. The Danish jump off chairs at the stroke of midnight in hopes that all the bad spirits will flee. They also throw old dishes on the doorstep of their friends. The person with the most broken dishes on their front stoop has the most friends.
3. In the Phillipines, the Filipinos wear polka dots and eat rounded fruit like grapes. The round shape is supposed to symbolize coins, in hopes that the coming year will bring prosperity.
4. When the clock begins to chime midnight, Spaniards try to eat 12 grapes before the last stroke of twelve.
5. In Puerto Rico, they throw buckets of water out the window to clean out the old year. Then they shine their homes from top to bottom to symbolize a cleansing of the spirit.
I like all these traditions so much I think it would be fun to combine them. Just think of it: Jump off a chair at midnight in a graveyard while eating 12 grapes, throwing a bucket of water and wearing a polka-dotted hair ribbon.
If that doesn’t bring good luck (or at least a really good story to tell at dinner parties), well then, you can always go back to making that list of New Year’s goals.
Tiffany Gee Lewis lives in St. Paul, Minn., and is the mother of four boys. She blogs at thetiffanywindow.wordpress.com. Her email is tiffanyelewis@gmail.com