Every year, my relatives have a New Year’s Eve party at their house. The guests involve family, friends and neighbors. Unlike Christmas when we had a nice fancy 5 course meal, New Year’s Eve is more of an informal buffet style dinner. My aunt and I started cooking two nights before the party. We were basically cooking for 2 days straight. I promised my relatives I would bake a cake. Of course, I made this promise before I remembered I was in Europe, the land of wonderful homemade baked goods. There was no way I could get away with baking a “cake from a box”. So, for the very first time ever I made a cake from scratch. Thanks to Natania, I got a really good recipe for banana nut cake with cream cheese frosting. It was pretty freaking good. I’ve also finally figured out how European cakes are almost always perfectly moist…they have this powder thing you add to the batter. I’m totally buying a bunch of those before I go home for good.
We finally finished cooking right before all the guests started to arrive at 8. We had so much food I didn't know where to start. The good thing was we had all night to eat so there was no need to eat everything all at once. Of course, beer and wine was served with food. I restrained myself and just drank water (without gas!..yuck).
While taking a break from stuffing ourselves, we watched an old short British film called, Dinner for One. Every New Year's Eve, this film is shown sporadically all throughout the day on TV, and it has nothing to do with New Years. It's pretty hilarious. It's about an old lady celebrating her birthday with friends who have already died and her butler. If you want to see it, it's on Youtube. It's about ten minutes and pretty awesome...you gotta love the Brits and its humor.
At midnight, we all drank champagne and greeted each other. After that, it was time to bundle up and create chaos in the backyard. Everyone brought all sorts of fireworks. It was ridiculous. The entire neighborhood was going crazy. Apparently, everyone competes with each other as to who has a better fireworks show. It was kind of scary because these things were literally exploding just a few feet away from me. Obviously, they don't have as many regulations here as we do in the US. Also, this is all happening in the freezing cold. It was kind of funny to see fire on the snow.
Sadly we ran out of fireworks (I didn't want it to end) and it started to get really cold. When we got back in, a neighbor gave each of us a lucky pig. In Germany, a pig brings you good luck, so on New Year's everyone gets some kind of pig paraphenalia.
Another tradition is to get your fortune from melted metal. Each person got a piece of metal. You put it in a spoon and melt it over a candle. Once it is completely melted, you dump it into cold water, which will solidify the metal in some other weird form. You take out the metal from the water and look at its shadow. Whatever shadow it creates will determine your fortune for the next year. My metal had a shadow of a hammer. The fortune said that I will make my own luck. I was pissed! It was like getting a fortune cookie with a fortune that said, "You are a caring and loving person". WTF!!! That's not a fortune! Luckily, there were a few more metal pieces left. So I melted another one and got a shadow of a tree this time. My fortune this time was true friendships. That sounded a lot better to me, so I was satisfied. Hopefully, it comes true here for me.
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| Gluckliche |
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