Make a Wish
A person who says they're not superstitious is lying if they are saying it on New Year's Day. Very, very few people exist in Spain who have never tried to eat twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Or gum drops, or mandarin wedges, or anything else that can be eaten in twelve small pieces. Then there are those who scoff at black cats, yet wear red underwear to usher in the new year. That's just a couple of the more common, automatic, superstitions. The red underwear was imported from Italy. The twelve grapes is purely Spanish. It began at the end of the nineteenth century. At first it was a private, bourgeois affair. The well-to-do middle class of Madrid would eat grapes and drink champagne in the evening on New Year's Eve. Apparently it was a custom imported from France and Germany. At that time it was the custom for madrileños of mostly the lower classes to go out and "search for the Magi" on the fifth of January. It was mostly an...