A door, a water bucket, grapes. How do you ring in the new year? Tell us your traditions.
By Michelle Marchante and
Forrest Milburn
New Year’s Eve celebrations in South Florida are very, very Miami.
Our “Ryan Seacrest” is Pitbull. Our New Year’s “Ball Drop” involves a giant neon orange at Bayfront Park going up a building, and the parties are lit.
You know what else makes our New Year’s Eve “So Miami?”
Our traditions.
Cubans and other Hispanics open the front door at midnight and throw out a bucket of water to wash away all the bad things and start over.
Others will share a New Year’s Eve kiss, walk around the block with a suitcase to attract travel opportunities in the new year or eat 12 grapes as the clock chimes 12 times.
Michelle Marchante covers the pulse of healthcare in South Florida and also the City of Coral Gables. Before that, she covered the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, crime, education, entertainment and other topics in South Florida for the Herald as a breaking news reporter. She recently won first place in the health reporting category in the 2025 Sunshine State Awards for her coverage of Steward Health’s bankruptcy. An investigative series about the abrupt closure of a Miami heart transplant program led Michelle and her colleagues to be recognized as finalists in two 2024 Florida Sunshine State Award categories. She also won second place in the 73rd annual Green Eyeshade Awards for her consumer-focused healthcare stories and was part of the team of reporters who won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for the Miami Herald’s breaking news coverage of the Surfside building collapse. Michelle graduated with honors from Florida International University and was a 2025 National Press Foundation Covering Workplace Mental Health fellow and a 2020-2021 Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism fellow. Support my work with a digital subscription
Forrest is the senior audience growth and engagement producer on the audience team, where he cares deeply about building reader loyalty and community engagement. He comes to the Miami Herald from the University of Texas at Austin. He most recently worked on the audience team at The Washington Post; but his Texas roots run deep, interning at papers across the Lonestar State.
