What Are (Were) You Doing On New Years Eve

When the bells all ring and the horns all blow
And the couples we know are fondly kissing.
Will I be with you or will I be among the missing?

Maybe it's much too early in the game
Ooh, but I thought I'd ask you just the same
What are you doing New Year's
New Year's eve?

Smoke, drinking, and cross-dressing. If I had to come up with three words to describe New Year’s here in Ecuador those would have to be the three I would choose. Now I will explain why and what crazy things Ecuadorians do to ring in the New Year.

Smoke… by about 2 minutes after midnight it seemed as if a heavy fog has engulfed Guraranda. I was up at my cousin’s house way up on a hill, about as high as you can get above Guaranda and still consider yourself in Guaranda. There were a couple of things that contributed to these copious amounts of smoke that seemed to take over my little mountain town. Fireworks were the first main cause of smoke. There are no firework laws or regulations here, it would be heaven for some I know (cough cough…Scott), but for me it can be a bit scary. There were little kids with firework wands, every 20 seconds or so they would shoot out another little ball of color whatever direction the kid was pointing the wand. The streets were very full of people and I found myself contemplating how on earth they didn’t have a ton of accidents. But I didn’t hear of any. But these were just the start of the firework fun, at midnight everybody and their grandmother had fireworks at the ready and at the stroke of midnight I could see probably a dozen different fireworks shooting up into the air from different parts of the city. The celebrations continued all night, very much helping my attempt at possibly getting a little bit of sleep (this was also helped with the professional grade speakers that were outside of my window that were finally turned off at 8 am…little bit different than the farm quite I am used to). The second cause of smoke was burning old people. Ok before you get all worked up let me explain. The tradition here is to build paper mache old people and burn them at midnight to represent getting rid of the old and bringing in the new. It was a little bit strange to walk down the street and see all these burning things that when inspected closer turned out to be old people. Sometimes families would even make whole families of old people with masks representing their family. So one family I know has a son who is black, he had a black old person mask on his person, other people had pony tails or braids. They were very intricate. Sometimes these people would be close to 20 ft. tall and the streets would be blocked off for their construction and display. It was quite the event, but over all very fun.

Drinking, ok so this is pretty self-explanatory, as in the United States people here like to ring in the New Year with lots of alcohol. I mean whatever, there isn’t very much to write on this, but it was a very large part of the celebrations. I was able to turn down the shot that was offered to me at our midnight turkey dinner. But the next morning when we went out for a walk there were still people drinking, ending at about 4pm the next day. None of this one night business, it is a 24 hour event. You can fill in the gaps for that, it is a pretty cross cultural tradition.

For a very homophobic society there sure is a lot of cross dressing. This was probably the funniest and strangest part of all the Ecuadorian traditions, and that is saying a lot. Starting at about 4pm New Year’s Eve large groups of boys dressed in their sisters, moms, and friends skirts and tops appeared out on the streets. They would blast music and make road blocks. When a car drove up they would dance very provocatively and then make the car pay before they would move away from in front of the car. They would also come up to people on the sidewalks, particularly gringas (white girls) and try to dance with them before they asked for money. This made walking around a hazardous but quite hysterical activity for me. These road blocks had been around for days, when my family came back from Quito 2 days before about every 2 minutes we would come upon a road block with little indigenous children asking for money. It was funny for about the first 2 but got a little tiring after 20 some, but the cross dressed boys were only added to them on New Year’s Eve. There were also parades of cross dressed boys that were accompanied by trucks with large speakers often blasting English music they didn’t understand and police officers. Over all it was quite amusing and more than a little bit odd. 

These are the main components of an Ecuadorian New Year’s celebration, but they are by far not the only ones. If you are superstitious (and like all Ecuadorians are), you could put on lucky bright yellow underwear and bras outside of your clothing at midnight to bring you good luck for the next year...I passed on this tradition. You could also burn the bad things that happened last year with your big burning old person and then save your list of things that you wanted to happen in the New Year for next year. Let’s just say you will NEVER be board during and Ecuadorian New Years.

Livin´ life on the loose.