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Today I am going to talk about an ancestral festival that is very lost today, known as the Home dels Nassos, dedicated on December 31 to the youngest members of the family. Writer, cartoonist and folklorist Apel·les Mestres explained it very well.

The adults commented that the little ones should look for a man who had as many noses as there are days in the year and the children imagined finding a bizarre man with 365 noses.

In Barcelona, ??formerly, the Man of the Noses appeared on the 31st of December, specifically, in the Pla de Palau in front of the Llotja, at 12 noon.

He stood on a platform so that everyone could see him cover himself with a few dozen sheets to cover the 365 noses he was supposed to have.

The change in mentality of the little ones and the arrival of other people to the Christmas holidays, such as Santa Claus, among others, has meant that, despite being a holiday that was celebrated in a large part of Europe, the Home dels Nassos has become been lost over time.

The night of December 31, New Year’s Eve, is together with that of the San Juan festival, one of the nights that carries the most superstitions throughout planet Earth, seeking to forget and banish all the bad things that have happened to us during the year and carry out a series of actions to try to make the coming year more prosperous and better than the previous one.

Although there is no reliable information, according to several scholars, the celebrations at the end of the year and the beginning of the next began to be celebrated in 1582, on the occasion of the unification of the calendars existing on that date to unify it in the old Gregorian calendar. .

Other scholars give the 19th century as the time when families gathered to celebrate the coming and going of the new year and give the year 1897 as the first, when the ancient city of Barcelona received an impressive gift, since on April 20 it grew in an impressive way.

On that day, Queen Regent María Cristina signed a Royal Decree by which the municipalities of Les Corts de Sarria, Villa de Gracia, Sant Andreu de Palomar, Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, Sant Martí de Provençals and Santa María de Sants were annexed to the city of Barcelona.

The tradition of celebrating it with the eating of 12 grapes accompanied by the ringing of bells, almost all scholars agree that it took place on New Year’s Eve of 1909, when some winegrowers from the Alicante region of Bajo Vinalopó had a great harvest and by the end of the year of the year they carried out a great campaign to dispose of the surplus of grapes.

However, until the arrival of television, each city held its New Year’s Eve party in a busy, central location where it was easy to go and return at the end of the celebration.

Among the superstitions of the night are:

New Year’s Eve has also had its anecdotes or gaffes due to the personal failures of the announcers who broadcast the event, especially since they have been broadcast on television:

As people’s imagination never rests, the students of the University of Salamanca in 2008 had the initiative to bring forward the end of the year party a few days earlier in order to celebrate it with all the students from the different faculties, since on the 31st Each one would be in a different place with their family. The students, in the Plaza Mayor, exchanged grapes for jelly beans. The festival was a great success and has been celebrated year after year since. This year the festival took place on December 14 with an attendance, according to the Salamanca city council, of 20,000 students.

In Barcelona, ??there have always been places where the New Year’s Eve celebration has been held, such as Plaza Catalunya or the Pueblo Español.

In 2013 it was moved to officially celebrate it on María Cristina Avenue and the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc, the place from where TV3 broadcasts the chimes for those people who do not wish to do so on other television channels.

This year, Barcelona City Council has prepared a party in which, in addition to the monumental scenery of the place, pyrotechnics, light and sound will flood the magical mountain.