¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

From our SpanglishBaby family to yours, we hope 2013 is filled with love, laughter, peace and LOTS and LOTS of Spanish

Happy New Year!

We’ve been in Texas since Friday spending time with some really good Mexican friends we consider family. We’re preparing everything for our New Year’s Eve celebration tonight and as I was checking to make sure we had enough grapes for everyone to eat 12 at the stroke of midnight, I started thinking of all the other traditions/superstitions Latinos have related to Año Nuevo.

12 uvas de la suerte

This tradition is originally from Spain, but has been adopted by many Latin American countries including Mexico. Tradition dictates that when the clock strikes midnight, you have to eat 12 grapes and make a wish with each stroke of the clock.

The 12 grapes represent the 12 months of the year and the idea is that by eating a dozen grapes, you’re ensuring the 12 months ahead will be good and prosperous ones.

¡A viajar!

If you want to travel, this is one I remember my mother doing every single year. All you have to do is go for a walk around your neighborhood with your suitcase before the clock strikes midnight. Some recommend you go around the block, but the other option is to cross the street in front of your house with your suitcase. I like this last option better now that I live in Colorado and it’s usually freezing cold on New Year’s Eve.

Green is for dinero

Many Latinos believe strongly that the color underwear they wear on December 31 will dictate the kind of luck they’ll have in the New Year. If you’re looking to attract love you need to wear red underwear.

For good luck or to attract money you better be wearing yellow. Although in some countries green is more closely associated with financial well-being and yellow with positive energy. I figure it doesn’t hurt, so why not?

Sweeping away todo lo malo

Nothing worse than starting the new year surrounded by negative energy. Hence, many people believe in sweeping the entrance to their home to get rid of it. Others put dollar bills near their front door and sweep them inwards to assure prosperity and financial good luck.

Others don’t sweep, but they fill a bucket or glass of water, open their front door and throw it out. The idea is the same: get rid of any bad energy and start the year as clean as possible.

I’ve never done this one, but maybe I should — especially the one with the dollar bills!

What New Year’s Eve traditions do you have?

{Photo by GoodNCrazy}

Photo credit: babasteve

Happy New Year to all of you! We hope 2011 bring you lots of happiness, peace, love and success! As 2010 comes to an end, both Ana Lilian and I want to thank you for all your support, inquiries, comments and contributions because without it SpanglishBaby would not be what it is today.

This has been a year full of awesomeness for SpanglishBaby. For starters, we celebrated our first anniversary with a major redesign which — after a few minor glitches — completely changed our look, making it much easier to find the information we’ve put together since we launched in Feb. 2009.

We also introduced you to five diverse and very talented regular contributors who have added invaluable insight to what it’s like to raise bilingual and bicultural children across the spectrum. We hope you’ve been enjoying and learning from their posts as much as we have. Along the same lines, we were lucky to add more distinguished experts to our already amazing roster. From what we hear, our Ask an Expert section is one of our your favorites, so rest assured that this is one area we plan on making even better.

We’ve also been truly active in terms of social media this year and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and everyone of our 2,800 followers on Twitter and our 1,272 followers on Facebook. We know not everyone has the time to come over here every day, so we appreciate your involvement with us through social media.

While we’re not ready to disclose what we have planned for next year — you didn’t think we’d celebrate our second anniversary sitting down, did you? — we do have lots of new and exciting ideas in store. So we hope you stick around .

In the meantime, I’d like to share with you some of the really cool media coverage SpanglishBaby got this year… Yes, we are bragging a bit, but we think that if this is the way we’re ending 2010, then 2011 can only be that much better!

Let us start with Ana Lilian’s excellent interview on CNN en Español’s NotiMujer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Ca2b-kQmY

• Parenting.com–Must Read Moms:  Mom Blogs We Love

• El Mundo: El mayor error es darse por vencido muy temprano

• El País: El Spanglish es cosa de bilingües

• Hispanic Business: The New Face of Social Media

• Su Socio de Negocios: SpanglishBaby.com, el blog que convirtió tiempo en dinero

• TodoPapás: Enseñar en el bilingüismo

• La Bloga: Raising Bilingual, Bicultural Kids

• 3 Blogs By Latinas 2010 Awards

¡Feliz Año Nuevo a todos!

Con muchísimo cariño,

Ana Lilian y Roxana