Inese Dūka

How to escape December 32nd…

…was a TV play I used to watch as a child. Now unfortunately I don’t remember any more what it was all about but the title itself sounds well enough! ;-)) Though the question seemed rather topical with the evening of December 31st approaching fast…

After countless phone calls, sms’es and e-mails it was decided the I am going to celebrate only with Arta, which was more than fine with me as during the last month I hadn’t seen all that much of her. Besides we seemed a match made in heaven – one can’t eat while the other is not allowed… And don’t ask me why…

The plan was to have a dinner, then go downtown to see the big fireworks and then return home and tell the New Year’s fortune. Strangely enough we actually did exactly what the plan was… Mother Nature did play a trick on us as already a couple of hours before midnight a thick fog fell seemingly on the whole of Latvia. At least my parents in Saldus (110 km West of Riga) complained about the same. Taking into consideration this you probably can imagine what the fireworks looked like… Not that I’m really complaining… ;-)) But we did learn one thing out of this – don’t stand all too close to the source of the fireworks if you don’t want to stand hooded in order to avoid the rests falling on you head…

The fortune telling part also went according to the plan. First we tried to cast our own future from lead. That is a rather widely spread Christmas/New Year’s tradition in Latvia. If you have no lead handy then paraffin also suits well. The main difference is that fortune cast from paraffin is mostly horizontal and floats while the one from lead is mostly vertical and sinks. Fortune telling is one of the old pagan Latvian traditions for this time of year. If you read any of the Latvian folk songs you’ll see plenty of magic and fortune telling…Nowadays this whole process is made rather easy as you can by lead figurines that have some sort of saying inside them. In a way a fortune cookie, I guess… Then once you melt down what ever material you’ve got (I can tell you from first hand experience, electrical stove isn’t enough for melting down lead… hehehe…) you cast it into a bowl of cold water. Then all the guessing can begin. Though to be more precise the guessing has to be done not by the outcome itself but from the shadow it casts… The second time around both Arta and I got birds. Seems like some changes are to be expected…

Next item on the plan was Arta giving me and herself a tarot reading for the next year. This also turned out to be much more positive than the general horoscopes we had read so far… And we concluded the evening with lighting the good old brinumsvecite – wonder candle – and making a wish…