My fiancée and I spent New Year's Eve this year at her father's house in New Jersey with her father, sister, sister's husband and their terribly behaved dogs Coco and Ewok. We waited up and watched the ball drop, and cheered and hugged everybody. Now my fiancée is very Greek. They are an extremely superstitious people and New Year's is a big one for doing little things to usher in good luck for the new year. Some of these rituals are very old and some I think they made up as family traditions.
For instance, silver coins have to be scattered on the floor of the house from New Year's Eve through New Year's Day for good luck and prosperity in the new year. You can't use the coins afterwards. Water is sprinkled in each room and what is left over is thrown out the front door to bless the whole house and rid the house of bad luck or the evil eye.
We have to watch Dick Clark's New Year's Eve Special on channel 7. I don't think the ancient Greeks had Dick Clark, but I know he is the "World's Oldest Teenager." We even had to leave the TV on in our house when we left so our house can usher in the new year.
One of the really big traditions is the cutting of the vasilopita. It is a round loaf of bread that has a silver Greek coin baked into it. Each household gets one. The idea is that at midnight on New Year's, the loaf is cut into as many slices as there are people in the household, including one for the house itself. We also include the dogs and cars. Each person picks a slice and the one that contains the coin gets extra good luck for the new year.
After midnight, we cut the loaf at my future father-in-law's house. My sister-in-law's husband got the coin. We gufawed at his win and ate a little of the bread for good luck. Afterward, we went home to cut our own vasilopita. We cut the bread after figuring out how many slices to cut. She picked a slice and I did. We chose ones for our daughter Ava, our dog and the house. My piece didn't contain the coin. Her piece didn't contain the coin. Neither did the other pieces. The coin is usually pretty easy to spot. My fiancée tore through the bread looking for the coin. I laughed and said we wanted a refund.
To my fiancée, she could her yia yia's (grandmother) voice in her head telling her that no coin was very bad luck. She immediately called up her father to tell him. He didn't pick up. She called a few more times until she got him on the phone. She blurted out to him how there was no coin. Her father quietly told her he just got a call from the doctor and yia yia died just after midnight. She had been in the hospital for two weeks after having trouble breathing at the nursing home. The doctors couldn't really figure out what was wrong with her. At first, they said she needed her gallbladder out, then she had a blood infection, pancreatitus. Then they finally said that she was having trouble breathing because her aorta was weakening. The doctor said last week that she only had a week to live.
Yia yia was one of the strongest and most stubborn women I ever met. She wasn't the baking cookies type grandmother. She was 91. Her body was failing her, but her mind was still sharp. She would take off her oxygen mask and order around the nurses in broken English. Honestly, we thought she would pull through and she appeared to be getting better. It was a big shock.
We believe in one last act of defiance she stole our coin to let us know she was leaving. In the previous four years she won it three times. Goodbye, yia!
