Ringing in the New Year in Cuenca

Happy New Year!

Our first New Year's Eve in Cuenca was a wonderful experience.  In Ecuador, people make mannequins, stuffed with paper and, sometimes, fireworks, to represent the old year.  We saw them for sale all over the city and in Azogues, but many people make their own.  Here are some pictures of two we saw in town at stores:

 

But the real treat was watching our neighbor, the woodcarver and restorer, and his children build their ano viejo (old year) figure. 

As you can see, the children (this picture is of our neighbor and two of his eight children) really enjoy the process of making the figure.  The tradition is that, at midnight, the figures are burned in the street so that all the trials, tribulations, and sins of the past year are destroyed.  It sets the stage for a new start for the New Year.  We were invited to come watch our neighbors burn their figure.

When we left the apartment at 11:30 PM, our neighbor and his sister (who speaks English) invited us to come to the apartment and join their family, waiting for the time to burn the figure.  We walked into a wonderful family party -- people of all ages, from tiny babies to the matriarch of the family.  People were dancing and having a wonderful time.

Our neighbor was dancing with his mother.

Then it came time for the burning of the figures.  Our neighbor and his family had three, and soon other people in the neighborhood put theirs on the pile, so we had about five or six on the pile.  It was too dark on the street to get a picture of the pile before the blaze, but here is a picture of the fire itself:

Can you imagine what would happen if you did this in the United States?  Remember, this is on a narrow street, right next to stores and apartments; of course, the construction here is adobe covered with stucco (this is an old part of the city). Some people put fireworks in theirs, so every once in a while there would be a "boom!"  And, remember, this is going on up and down the street and on streets all over Cuenca.  Looking north and south on our street, we saw big blazes as far as we could see.

The children were all excited, running around in the streets.  They had fireworks, too.

 We stood on the opposite side of the street and watched the blaze until it had almost burned out.

 Here I am with our neighbor and his mother. (I feel tall!)

We were then invited back up to the apartment for coffee and humitas, a kind of corn-meal pastry cooked in a corn leaf.  We got home at about 1:30 AM -- the latest I've been up for any occasion in decades.

It didn't matter that few of them spoke English and we speak almost no Spanish.  We felt welcomed.  These people don't have a lot of money, but the warmth they showed us was worth so much. Our neighbors are wonderful people. Ecuadorians are wonderful people. 

The country-wide party continues; I can hear firecrackers (they sound like half-sticks of dynamite, actually) as I sit by the window writing this.