New Year´s Eve

New Year´s Eve in Bolivia can be a physical and mental workout. The variety of rituals involved vary from one region to another, but all are intended to get you off on the right foot as the year begins.

Before the night begins, men and women should buy women red or yellow underpants, which they have to put on as midnight approaches. The red symbolises love and yellow means money. If you are wearing, for example, red underpants at midnight, then you will have plenty of luck in love in the coming year.

The first set of rituals on the night involve food. Immediately after the clock strikes 12am, each person at the New Year´s party eats 12 grapes, one for each month of the year, and for each grape makes a wish. Either just before or after doing this, a toast will be served with (cheap) champagne in most houses.  The typical plate which is served is pork. The reasoning behind this is that pigs always move forward, never backwards (check this out next time you see a pig); a pig always eats moving forward, whereas a chicken (for example) eats walking backwards. By eating pork, you are therefore starting the year moving forwards, rather than backwards.

The next ritual is a mental exercise. Each person must count the money that they have on them at the time, or can easily reach. This can be real money from their wallet or fake, monopoly-style money, which is sold in vast quantities in the markets before New Year´s Eve. I´m not entirely sure what the purpose of this is, but I think the idea is probably that as a result, throughout the year you will be counting your (vast quantities of) money. Once the money is counted, beer is then poured over the money, as an offering to the pachamama (the earth mother), who will hopefully take this offering into account by somehow multiplying the person´s current stash.

One final ritual (which I didn´t see this year, but did experience in the previous New Year´s celebrations), is for each member of the house to run up and down stairs. They may do this while counting their money. Travelling up and down the stairs represents the travelling they will do during the year to come, and by frenetically making their way from one floor to the other, they will of course be making sure that they barely stay still for the next twelve months.

In Amarete, to bring in the new year, we did all but the last of these rituals. The party didn´t begin until midnight, and then went on for the whole of New Year´s Day (though I sensibly went to bed at about 3am and got some shut-eye). For the most part, the party involved heavy-drinking (as is the case with every party in Amarete), though in the plaza from about midday onwards, many people danced Moseñada, along to live music. The most fun part of New Year´s Day was probably the evening, when a group of young people from each of the zones of the town, led by one man bearing a flag, joined hands, and ran, snaking their way around the plaza and then down to the house of one of the local authorities. This is known as Cach´uar. In the patio of the house, more and more men and women, adults and children, young and old, joined hands, running pell-mell around the patio, led by the flag-bearer, every so often one or more of them slipping over as the speed on the uneven ground became too much. Although I´m yet to be exactly clear on the significance behind cach'uar, I´ve been toild that the "dance" is performed to please the elements of nature.