Twelve days of non-stop celebrating. Text by Mark Little. Hours before midnight on New Years Eve, tens of thousands of people gather in Madrid s Puerta del Sol to await the chimes of the clock on the tower which dominates the Spanish capital s central square. The excitement builds up as the magic hour approaches. Finally, at the stroke of midnight and the dawn of the new year, everyone will eat twelve grapes, one for each chime.
Tradition has it that eating the twelve grapes guarantees luck for the coming year.
Similar ceremonies take place in village and town squares all across the country, and in Spanish homes where families gather to watch the twelve chimes broadcast live from Madrid. I d like to tell you that the grape eating ceremony is a ritual whose origins are lost in the mists of time, but in fact it is of quite recent vintage. Early in the twentieth century, according to most versions of the story, freak weather conditions resulted in an unseasonable bumper harvest of grapes. At a loss over what to do about so many grapes at Christmas time, the canny growers came up with the idea of the New Year ritual. The success of the idea is a tribute to Spaniards talent not only at celebrating fiestas, but at coming up with new variations on the theme.