New Year's

Hats, horns and light-up headbands in a fin de año kit:

most hosts start from one. A kit gives each guest a cardboard hat or mask, a necklace and a noisemaker. The light-up kits swap the cardboard for fibre-optic headbands and glowing glasses that run on button cells, and those are the only part of any kit that lasts beyond one night. Cardboard hats crush in a drawer and paper horns go limp, so buy them for this year and expect to throw them out.

Gold foil numbers, fringe curtains and the year printed on things:

anything with the year on it, a banner, novelty glasses, a cake topper, is finished a minute after midnight. The pieces worth paying for are year-free: a “Feliz Año Nuevo” banner, a black-and-gold balloon garland, a fringe curtain behind the table, all of which work again for a birthday or a graduation. Foil number balloons sit in between, because from one December to the next only the last digit changes, so keep the rest and buy one new number. Most have a self-sealing valve and can be filled with air through a straw and taped to a wall, where they outlast helium, which has sunk by morning.

Yellow underwear, the suitcase and the other agüizotes:

most of them need nothing anyone could list. The grapes come from the farmers’ market, the suitcase is your own and the Santa Lucía goes straight into the wallet. Plenty of people wear a chosen colour on the night of the 31st, yellow for luck, red for love, green for money, and the underwear for the first of January is the one item here that only makes sense new and in its packet. Sequinned party dresses are the opposite: most are worn for a single night and pass easily to a second owner. Red bought for the agüizote often gets another outing under Valentine’s Day, and string lights that stay up all December belong under Christmas.

A party kit for ten against one for fifty:

a kit of hats, necklaces and noisemakers for ten guests runs around ₡20,000 new, and the light-up version for the same ten costs a little over twice that. A pack for fifty comes in around ₡60,000, so the cost per guest halves once the list passes a couple of dozen. Second-hand, cardboard and paper are worth next to nothing. What holds a price is whatever still lights up, a fringe curtain still on its strip, and any unopened pack, which tends to go to someone who left the shopping until the last week.

Batteries, valves and rims on second-hand party gear:

switch every light-up piece on before paying. Button cells left in a headband since last December leak and corrode the contacts, and a sign that lights on only part of its letters has a broken strip inside. A foil number should still hold air a day after filling; a crease across the face is cosmetic, a pinhole along the seam is not. Fringe curtains hang from tape that rarely sticks twice, and tangle in storage, so shake one out before taking it. Run a finger round the rim of each flute for chips and check any gold band, which a dishwasher strips in a few washes. On a sequinned dress, look under the arms and along the hem, where sequins go first.

The light-up sign that has to be photographed switched on:

shoot LED pieces lit in a dim room, foil numbers inflated so the skin shows, and kits with every piece laid out and counted. Say what is unopened, and say plainly when nothing carries a year. List from the start of December; after New Year’s Day the box waits for next season unless it is year-free and can be retitled for a birthday. Most buyers come in the last days of December, so pack each kit back into one bag with the count written on it: someone driving in from Alajuela or Cartago on the afternoon of the 31st has no time to come back for the missing noisemakers.