How to use these
Thirty questions in four rounds: New Year traditions around the world, the calendar and the clock, fireworks and their chemistry, and a closing round of numbers and oddities whose last question is a tiebreak. Read them out one at a time with a twenty-second answer window, or type them into a community quiz on omequiz so everyone answers on their own phone and the score keeps itself. At a party where the host is also watching the oven and the clock, that is not a small thing.
Each answer comes with a sentence or two of story, because "twelve" is a dull answer and twelve grapes eaten to the chimes of a clock in Madrid is not. Where an answer rests on folklore rather than record, such as what a lucky first visitor should look like or where a German greeting comes from, the wording says "according to tradition" or "commonly credited", and it is worth reading it out that way. A quiz that presents a legend as fact is asking to be corrected by the one guest who knows better.
The time-zone questions are phrased with the same care. The usual answer to "who sees the new year first?" is New Zealand, and it is wrong; the usual answer to "who sees it last?" is rarely better. Both are in round two, worded so that nobody can argue with them: they ask for the first and last inhabited places, because at the far end of the clock two uninhabited islands sit in a time zone of their own.
Round one: traditions around the world
1. In Spain, what do people eat at midnight, one for each chime of the clock? Twelve grapes, las uvas de la suerte or "grapes of luck", timed to the clock on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, whose chimes are broadcast live across the country. The custom is commonly traced to 1909, when growers around Alicante had a surplus to sell, though there are reports of it in Madrid before that.
2. What do Scots call the last day of the year? Hogmanay, a word whose origin nobody has pinned down. For centuries it was the bigger festival in Scotland, because the Protestant Kirk frowned on Christmas: Christmas Day did not become a public holiday there until 1958.
3. In Scotland and the north of England, what is it called when you are the first person to cross a home's threshold after midnight? First-footing. According to tradition the luckiest first-footer is a tall, dark-haired man bearing gifts (coal for the fire, salt, shortbread or black bun, a dram of whisky), and one popular explanation for the dark hair is that a fair-haired stranger at the door once meant Vikings.
4. Who wrote down "Auld Lang Syne", and what does the title mean? Robert Burns, in 1788, who said he had taken it from an old man's singing; the title means roughly "old long since", or "for old times' sake". In Japan the melody is sung at school graduations as "Hotaru no Hikari" and played in shops to announce closing time.
5. How many times are the bells of Buddhist temples in Japan struck on New Year's Eve? 108. The ceremony is called joya no kane, and the number stands for the 108 worldly desires that Buddhist teaching says trouble a human life; each stroke is meant to clear one of them away before the year begins.
6. In which country do people climb onto chairs and jump into the new year at the stroke of midnight? Denmark. By tradition it is also where old plates are saved up and smashed against friends' front doors on New Year's Eve, and a big heap of shards on the doorstep in the morning means you have plenty of friends.
7. What did families in Germany and Austria melt in a spoon over a candle, then drop into cold water to read the coming year from its shape? Lead; the custom is called Bleigießen. Since 2018 sets containing lead may no longer be sold in the EU, because the metal is toxic, so the game is now played with wax or lead-free tin.
8. In Germany, what do some hosts hide in one or two of the jam doughnuts served on New Year's Eve? Mustard. The doughnuts are called Berliner in most of Germany, Pfannkuchen in Berlin itself and much of the east, and Krapfen in the south and in Austria, so the plate can start an argument before anyone has bitten into the wrong one.
Round two: the calendar and the clock
9. Why is New Year's Eve called "Silvester" in German and "Sylwester" in Polish? Because 31 December is the feast day of Pope Sylvester I, who died on that date in 335. The French name the evening after him too, la Saint-Sylvestre, and so do the Italians with San Silvestro, though few of the people celebrating could tell you anything else about him.
10. Which Roman god gave January its name? Janus, the two-faced god of doors and beginnings, who looks back at the old year and forward to the new. Rome began its official year on 1 January from 153 BC, when the consuls started taking office on that day, and Julius Caesar's calendar kept it; the oldest Roman calendar had started in March, which is why September to December still carry the Latin numbers seven to ten.
11. How many days were skipped when Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar in 1582? Ten: Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October. The Julian year was about eleven minutes too long, and over the centuries the calendar had drifted away from the seasons, taking the date of Easter with it; Teresa of Ávila died on the night of 4 October that year, and the next morning was the fifteenth.
12. Until 1752, on which date did the year officially begin in England? 25 March, Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation. Scotland had moved to 1 January in 1600; England and its colonies followed in 1752, the year Britain also adopted the Gregorian calendar and Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September. The usual explanation for why the British tax year still starts on 6 April is that it is the old New Year's Day, moved on by the days that were lost.
13. On which date do many people in Russia and Serbia celebrate the "Old New Year"? 14 January, which is 1 January in the Julian calendar, now thirteen days behind. Russia changed its civil calendar only in 1918 while the Orthodox Church kept the old one, which left the country with a second New Year's Eve a week after Orthodox Christmas.
14. Which inhabited place is the first to reach midnight on New Year's Eve? Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, in the Line Islands of Kiribati, whose clocks run fourteen hours ahead of Greenwich: its midnight is 10 a.m. in London. Kiribati moved its eastern islands to the far side of the date line at the start of 1995 so that the whole country shares one date; the atoll has nothing to do with Australia's Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean and owes its name to James Cook, who arrived on Christmas Eve 1777.
15. And which inhabited places are the last? American Samoa and Niue, eleven hours behind Greenwich, where midnight comes when it is already 11 a.m. on New Year's Day in London. Only the uninhabited Baker and Howland Islands, an hour further behind, are later; independent Samoa, a short flight from American Samoa, switched sides of the date line by skipping 30 December 2011 and now celebrates about a day earlier than its neighbour.
16. When the fireworks go off over Sydney Harbour at midnight, what time is it in London? 1 p.m. on New Year's Eve. December is summer in Australia, so Sydney is on daylight saving time, eleven hours ahead of Greenwich, which puts its fireworks on European lunchtime news and on New York's breakfast television at 8 a.m.
Round three: fireworks and their chemistry
17. In which country was gunpowder invented? China. The discovery is commonly credited to alchemists of the ninth century who were looking for an elixir of long life and found a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal instead; the Chinese word for a firecracker, baozhu, still means "exploding bamboo", after the green bamboo stems once thrown on fires for their bang.
18. Which metal gives a firework its red? Strontium. The colours come from the same physics as the flame test in a school chemistry lesson: heat lifts a metal's electrons to a higher energy, and as they fall back they give off light in a colour particular to that element. Strontium is named after Strontian, a village in the Scottish Highlands where its mineral was first found.
19. And which metal makes green? Barium, named from the Greek "barys", heavy, after baryte, the dense mineral it was found in. Until well into the nineteenth century fireworks were mostly gold, orange and white; strong colours like this green came with newer chemistry.
20. Which metal makes blue, and why is blue the hardest colour to get right? Copper. The compound that glows blue falls apart if the flame is too hot and glows weakly if it is too cool, so a deep, clean blue is the mark of a skilled fireworks maker; mixed with strontium red, it gives purple.
21. Which element gives a yellow so strong that fireworks makers have to keep it out of every other colour? Sodium, the element behind the yellow-orange of old street lamps and the yellow flare when salted pasta water boils over onto a gas flame. A trace of it in a green or blue mixture is enough to wash the colour out.
22. You see a rocket burst and hear the bang three seconds later. Roughly how far away was it? About a kilometre. Light arrives practically at once, while sound covers only about 330 metres a second in cold winter air, so every three seconds between flash and bang means roughly one kilometre, the same rule of thumb that works for thunderstorms.
23. Roughly what pressure is there inside a bottle of champagne? About six bar, two to three times the pressure in a car tyre, which is why the cork should point at the ceiling and never at a face. The monk Dom Pérignon is commonly credited with inventing champagne, but in his day bubbles in wine were widely seen as a fault, and his line "I am drinking the stars" appears to come from much later advertising.
Round four: numbers and oddities
24. In which year did a ball first drop in New York's Times Square to mark the new year? 1907, for the arrival of 1908. The idea came from the time balls once dropped at harbours and observatories so that ships could set their clocks (the one at Greenwich was put up in 1833 and drops at one in the afternoon), and the only years New York went without were 1942 and 1943, under wartime blackout rules.
25. In "Dinner for One", what does Miss Sophie answer when her butler asks, "The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?" "The same procedure as every year, James." The German broadcaster NDR recorded the sketch in English in 1963, with Freddie Frinton and May Warden; it runs about eighteen minutes, is barely known in Britain, and has been shown on German television every New Year's Eve since the 1970s. Miss Sophie is celebrating her ninetieth birthday with four friends who have all died, so James plays each of them in turn and drinks every toast himself.
26. According to one popular explanation, which language does the German New Year greeting "Guten Rutsch", literally "a good slide", come from? Yiddish, from "rosch", the Hebrew word for "head" as in Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The other common explanation is that in older German a "Rutsch" could simply mean a short journey, so the wish is for a good trip into the new year; neither has been proven, so accept the Yiddish answer and read out the doubt along with it.
27. Which animal, often made of marzipan, is a classic German lucky charm at New Year? The pig: "Schwein haben", to have pig, means to be lucky in German. One popular explanation is that the loser of a medieval contest was given a pig as a consolation prize, though the origin of the idiom is not settled; on the table it keeps company with chimney sweeps, four-leaf clovers, horseshoes and red-and-white toadstools.
28. Strictly speaking, on which date did the third millennium begin? 1 January 2001, not 2000. Our year count, worked out by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century, has no year zero (1 BC is followed directly by AD 1), so the second millennium ran to the end of 2000, a point that did nothing to stop the world celebrating a year early.
29. Which march ends the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert on 1 January, with the audience clapping along? The Radetzky March, by Johann Strauss the elder: the father, not the son who wrote "The Blue Danube", which is the other traditional encore. The concert comes from the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna and is broadcast around the world on New Year's Day.
30. Tiebreak: how many seconds are there in a year of 365 days? 31,536,000: sixty seconds, times sixty minutes, times twenty-four hours, times 365 days; a leap year has 31,622,400. Closest guess wins, and anyone caught working it out on their phone forfeits.
Running it at a New Year's Eve party
Timing is the whole trick. The evening has a fixed end that nobody can move, and a quiz still on its third round at ten to twelve will be abandoned for the champagne. Work backwards from midnight: last round finished by about half past eleven, scores added up by a quarter to, and the final quarter of an hour left free for glasses, coats and the countdown. With thirty questions and the stories read out, that means starting at around half past ten, or splitting the quiz: two rounds before the dinner plates are cleared, two after.
Round two pays off if you play it live. If you are in Britain, midnight reaches Paris and Berlin at eleven o'clock your time, and pausing for a toast to whichever neighbours have just got there keeps a room awake that has been sitting at the table for an hour. The Sydney question works the other way round: anyone who saw the fireworks on the lunchtime news has an advantage, which is part of the fun.
New Year's Eve is often the one party of the year where three generations share a room and children stay up far later than usual. Round one and the colour questions in round three work for anyone from about eight upwards; the calendar round is for adults. Mixed teams beat a children's table against the grown-ups: a grandparent who remembers the fuss about the millennium and a teenager who can do time zones in their head make a team that is hard to beat. If the youngest will not last until midnight, give them a short quiz and a countdown of their own at nine; by then Kiritimati has been in the new year for eleven hours anyway.
The tiebreak should be an estimation question, because two teams level on points at eleven at night are rarely separated by another fact they both half-know. Question 30 is written for exactly that; the year of the first Times Square ball drop works too. Closest answer wins, and if both teams are equally far off, call it a draw. At that hour it is the most popular result anyway.
If you play on phones, set the quiz up a day or two before rather than at ten to eleven on the night. An omequiz room holds up to ten players, who join with a six-character code; at a bigger party, play in teams with one phone each. Points come for correct answers and for speed, and anyone celebrating elsewhere (the cousin abroad, the grandparents who stayed at home) can join the same room, with voice or video if you want it. While guests are still arriving, the daily round of five questions makes a two-minute warm-up.
And once the fireworks are over and nobody can concentrate on dates any more, stop quizzing. A round of Taboo or draw & guess suits the first hour of the new year far better than a fifth round of questions.
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