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Superstitions abound in the new year, so to make sure you get your fortunes all in a row, I’ve decided to compose a little list of do’s and don’ts for this first day of the year. Here goes:
DO: invite a male stranger into your home
DON’T: invite a male stranger into your home who has the markings of the devil (i.e. evil eye, flat feet, uni-brow) I’m guessing there are a few other signs as well, but if you want to be 100% sure the old boy doesn’t come around, you can always spread some honey on the door knob. This apparently keeps Satan at bay. You’re on your own with the bees.
DO: party all night long
DON’T: forget the noisemakers. In ancient times these were used to drive away spirits.
DO: make sure the spirits you drive away are the evil kind, not the alcoholic kind. It's bad luck to run out of booze on new years.
DON’T: forget to keep extra water bottles on hand, along with ample space in the fridge. Apparently, water turns to wine on new years day, so you’ll need somewhere to keep all that booze.
DO: Eat black eyed peas. These have been a sign of good fortune for ages.
DON’T: Eat fish. Or anything else with fins. According to ancient proverbs, eating finned creatures on new years will bring short lived luck and long lived misfortune. Better call that whaling party back to shore before its too late.
DO: Wish good luck and good fortune on almost everyone you see.
DON’T: Wish good luck and good fortune on the mailman. This one is weird, and I’m still trying to figure it out, but it has something to do with delivering bad news, etc. Sorry, mail carriers, you’ll just have to hang out together somewhere else. By yourselves.
DO: Make sure your cupboards are stocked, and your fridge is full. An empty cupboard bodes ill for the following year.
DON’T: Stock your cupboards with canned fish. (Again with the fish.) I’m guessing some of these superstitions were just an excuse for fishermen to have the week off.
DO: Kiss a loved one when the bells ring in the new year.
DON’T: Kiss a mirror. This ones a bit of a stretch. In the days of yore, a mirror was hard to come by. Remember, these were dark times, with creepy forests and wolves and plagues and such, and everything foreign was covered by a cloak of mystery and intrigue. Foreign things were also evil, of course. If you were a peasant, and you probably were ( no offense), seeing your reflection might just scare the bejeesus out of you. It might also give you good reason to add mirrors to your list of bewitched objects, along with animal jawbones and toenails and things like that. Some witty folk decided ‘what better place for a witch to live?’ than inside this cursed object. And, of course, the only way to release a witch from a mirror was to chant a spell , or on that rare occasion, to kiss the mirror on the first day of the year. There are probably more stories about this whole mirror thing, lost in the pages of some wizards journal, but for us commoners there’s enough left-over story here to just have a general “safe” fear of mirrors. It’s probably best to leave the mirrors at home on new years anyway, or at least wait until after the witching hour before making like Narcissus.
So that’s my short list of Superstition 101, for 1-1-08.
Luv,
Dolan
Happy New Year (mailmen excluded, sorry)
PS: Here's the black-eyed peas recipe we're testing out today, compliments of Daily Candy.
1 comment:
Very interesting read. Not exactly the info I was Googling for.
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