After exactly one year you must have learnt that every special occasion has to be celebrated with some (good food). So, prepare the salt, a knife, the chopping board and the best..golden onions that you have. What? No, no, don’t fry them. We are going to use them as.. a weather forecast! Surprise!!
This is a very long tradition, that even goes back to the Middle Ages. It doesn’t only predict the weather for the day after, but for the whole coming year! It is indeed a very usual tradition which is done on the 24th of January, even if someone is more eager to do it on the first days of January.
The easy part is the cutting of the onion: just cut it into 4 pieces; from one piece you get another 4 pieces out, until you have 12 pieces of onion.
The 12 onions represent the 12 months. Put 6 pieces next to each other in a row, then make a second row of the remaining 6 below. The first piece at the top left represents January. Then you sprinkle some salt on each part. The cutting board is placed on a north-facing window and the onions are then checked every 4 hours: at 22:00, at 2:00 and at 6:00.
If this is the difficult part for you, we can provide you a video that better explains it 😉
But, hold on! Now the tricky part: the interpretation of the onions. It needs indeed a very long experience and in our region we have indeed very few “onions-weathermen”. One of them is Alfio Lilli, who lives in Jesi whose calendar for 2019 has been already spread out. Curious about the prediction? For January the forecast says:
– first decade: cold-snow-frost
– second decade: rain-snow-changeable
– third decade: cold-snow-frost.
And so on until December. It doesn’t seem a mild January, does it? I don’t know if hoping for the right or wrong interpretation 😉
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