Let’s do this together
Making – and breaking – new year’s resolutions have been going on since the beginning of time. Or at least 4,000 years ago, when ancient Babylonians were the first people to vow to pay off debts, or return items they’d borrowed. Like the Dead Sea library scrolls, I imagine.
I know our traditional New Year’s Eve is getting hammered and mouthing the words to Auld Lang Syne, but I wanted to learn about NYE traditions around the world.
Teacher Laura Steele of education resource experts planbee.com came up with some crackers… or rather grapes, which is what the Spanish eat on the stroke of midnight. A grape is thought to bring good luck for the coming months.
We Brits also do this of course, only we have them crushed and bottled first.
Doughnuts are eaten in Germany, which are filled with jam if you’re lucky, or mustard if you’re not. Here we have Greggs, which sells something that tastes like a combination of both.
In Estonia on New Year’s Day, people attempt to eat either seven, nine or 12 times throughout the day, as these are lucky numbers. Again, this is not unlike the UK, where hungover revellers are known to graze straight from the fridge to regulate low sugar levels.
Things get a bit different in Greece where an onion is hung on the front door as a symbol of rebirth. Parents then wake their children on New Year’s Day by tapping them on the head with the onion.
While in this country, it’s the other way round in the early hours after a night’s drinking, when a small child taps mummy on the head with a dripping-wet doll, while saying: “Wake up, Mummy, Barbie just fell in the loo.”
In Brazil, people dress in white clothes to symbolise their hopes for good luck and peace in the new year. And if they live near a beach, it’s tradition to jump over seven waves – for each wave, they receive a wish.
Again, it’s not unknown for our people to head to the icy cold beach on New Year’s Day in the UK but they mostly jump around going blue with cold until carted off by St John’s Ambulance.
However you celebrate the end of 2020 tonight, I wish us all a happier new year.
Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.