Learn about the Old Year doll: how is year-end celebrated in Colombia?

JamCam 2025 Cali prepares to welcome the new year 2026, Colombia shares its traditions with the other contingents and together they prepare the Old Year doll.

In Colombia, families have the custom of assembling together a doll filled with rags, sawdust, and used clothing for the night of December 31, where it is burned. This tradition symbolizes the burden of memory, social criticism, and energetic renewal that reflects Colombian culture through an act of purification.

The Old Year as a popular tradition has its origin in practices inherited from Europe, adapted in Ecuador and resignified by the native societies of the Andean mountain ranges as a symbolic act that bids farewell to the negative and opens the way to a new cycle. This tradition was born in the 19th century in the cities of Guayaquil, with the aim of “cleaning” the environment and warding off the epidemics that attacked the society of the time.

The Colombian tradition is resumed each December to make a definitive closure to the past and welcome a new beginning. The Old Year doll begins to be assembled from the first days of December together with family, friends, and close ones, so that on the last day of the year it can be burned and take away all the bad things of the year.

At JamCam 2025 Cali, on December 31, all participating boys and girls will assemble the Old Year together, the goal is for each subcamp to obtain a doll to be presented at the year-end closing event. This act will be symbolic, where each doll will be exhibited and will represent the closure of 2025 for the people who made them, the Old Year dolls will not be burned for the safety of JamCam attendees.