Hump day recommendations - New Years edition!

Celebrate a la Chilena: Throw on some yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve to ensure a good love life in 2024, then eat a big spoonful of lentils and stash 1,000 Chilean pesos in your shoe for financial luck. At the stroke of midnight, eat 12 grapes, one for each month, and make a wish on each one. If you get a sweet grape, your wish will come true! If it’s sour, well… maybe try again for the next month? - Matt

Wake up drunk in the wrong city: If you want to celebrate the New Year like a Russian (or really anyone from the former USSR), tuck into the classic Soviet screwball comedy The Irony of Fate, in which newly engaged Zhenya gets so wasted in Moscow on New Year’s Eve that he accidentally winds up on a plane to Leningrad where, owing to the bland conformity of Soviet architecture, he goes “home” to a building identical to his, at the same address as his, where he enters an apartment with the same furniture as his. But it actually belongs to a woman named Nadya – and the rom-com takes off from there... - Alex

Watch: Rare Exports: My favorite Santa is scary Santa. French Connection and Bad Santa scratch the itch but none do it better than this Finnish horror parody. Set near the Russian border in Northern Finland, an American millionaire excavating a mountain stumbles upon the corpse of ancient Laplandic Santa Claus. Well, not Santa precisely, but a scrawny beast of a man, who ends up wearing a Santa suit – strictly for warmth – as he uses his sack to deliver children to their evil maker. Traumatizing if viewed too young, this film is as Christmas as a lump of coal. – Riley