Stuart Walton digests the sometimes-alarming traditions that are part of new year celebrations around the world.
Ringing out the old year and ringing in the new is a custom beset with ambivalence. Most of my recent years have been more like the fractious drunk who gets hurled out on to the street at closing time than the dear old friend on whose cheek one plants the fond farewell kiss. However that goes, welcoming in the new year is always marked with the kind of hope that springs eternal, even when foredoomed.
I once found myself in the crush at a pub counter just before the midnight chimes, buying a round of Jack Daniel’s on ice for a bunch of sponges I had never met, and whom I would never clap eyes on again. Obviously, their luck was in, even if mine had run dry. But really, what you want on the eve of another year is welcoming wine, not Tennessee whiskey.
Plangently symbolic
The most plangently symbolic, but wholly alarming, new year tradition happens in Spain, and increasingly among Hispanic communities worldwide. Las doce uvas de la suerte (the twelve grapes of luck) are consumed one by one in the rapid succession determined by the twelve midnight chimes of the clock. Good fortune and prosperity in the coming year, not to mention plenty of good wine, will attend those who manage to get down the whole dozen without the need for recourse to the Heimlich manoeuvre.
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Spanish television broadcasts the twelve o’clock bongs, but the authentic experience involves clustering before the Post Office clock tower on the Puerta del Sol square in the center of Madrid. The tradition seems to be no older than the turn of the last century, and was given a substantial publicity boost in 1909, when wine growers in the Alicante region encouraged it to help dispose of excess grape production following a particularly bountiful harvest.
It is now possible to buy new year’s grape packs in the supermarkets, the seedless berries even peeled to help them down. Choking accidents, particularly among the elderly and small children, are not unknown, and there have been calls to make the intervals between chimes on the night longer than normal. As long as the first one is punctual, after all, the rest can take their time. The longer pause also allows you to ruminate appropriately on the twelve forthcoming months the grapes represent. Thoughtlessly snaffling them down is a recipe for an uneventful year at best.
According to one variant of the tradition, consuming the doce uvas while hiding under a table is said to guarantee romantic success in the coming year. Its chances of working are probably enhanced if you happen to find somebody else under there with you, but that could easily go either way.
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In Chile, a gold ring is dropped into a glass of sparkling wine, which must then be sipped cautiously, to ensure prosperity in the year ahead. Dropping in your wedding ring should cement your connubial bliss for another golden year.
The Dutch tradition is to accompany festive Champagne with oliebollen—literally, oil balls, hot deep-fried doughballs studded with dried fruit—to encourage the fates to look kindly on the year to come, by seeing off any malevolent spirits. Whatever havoc they have wreaked in the outgoing year, all hobgoblins need to be kicked into touch before the new one gets under way.
A time of evil spirts
Evil spirits obviously see new year as a hot-button date in the calendar to prey on humans. In Japan, they drink toso, a spiced medicinal sake, the better to wash out the toxins of the previous year’s unpleasantness and cleanse the body in preparation for the next. Fragrant with sansho pepper, ginger and cloves, the drink is served in an ascending hierarchy from the youngest family member to the eldest, dispensing its benison as it is passed from hand to hand.
An important aspect of tradition is that it can be invented. Great venerability is often claimed for practices that might have been gleaned from a B-movie somebody saw twenty years ago, or a hilarious seasonal accident of one’s own. Do the Russian people really write down their wishes for the new year, burn the paper, dissolve the ashes in bubbling wine and knock it back? It sounds good, but it sounds a little like the adventitious western habit of putting paper wishes into Chinese lanterns, which are then set alight and left to drift off and start a conflagration in somebody else’s garden. If they do burn and consume their wishes in Russia, let’s all hope they wish for peace.
The Chinese people traditionally drink baiju, the hectic clear grain spirit, to see in the new year, give evil spirits their marching orders, and ensure robust good health. Urban sophisticates are increasingly given to drinking grape wines instead these days, but not at the end of December. Nobody calls that new year.
If there’s happy to be had next year, may it find you.
