Growing up, at exactly 12:01 a.m. on January 1st, a series of magical rituals unfolded to welcome the new year.
First, everyone gathered for the celebration exchanged big fat hugs, wishing each other a happy new year. The first person you hugged should be someone of the opposite sex to ensure harmonious romantic relationships—or to find a good partner if you didn’t have one. (Yes, this has intense homophobic undertones, and I’m not proud of that. These days, I’ve updated it to hugging someone who embodies the qualities of the kind of partner or relationship you’d like to have. If you’re lucky, it might even be the actual person!)
This is all happening while women in the room are all wearing yellow undies, for the same reason (luck in love). Don’t ask, this is just how it is.
Then comes the lentils: 12 teaspoons, one for each month of the year, to ensure abundance. Next, you stand on a chair holding a suitcase, a surefire way to summon tropical vacations, spontaneous adventures, or even Antarctic cruises.
And that’s just the beginning. There are grapes to eat, gold to drop into champagne flutes before toasting the year, red handkerchiefs to make a talisman for your purse… Honestly, a book could be written on New Year’s rituals alone. The key is that all of this must happen at midnight—not the next morning, when you get up on January 1st. By then, the new year isn’t exactly new anymore, is it?
Dancing is also mandatory—because how you start is how you’ll go. If you want to spend the year dancing, start it that way!
If you want to spend a lot of time doing anything in 2025, make sure you do some of it in the early hours of January 1st.
This is just part of what I’ll be up to tonight. I hope you get a chance to incorporate some of these rituals to connect with your magic on this powerful threshold night.