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Oh, and here at first I thought maybe you’d taken up creating Jackson Pollock style art.

But why mock superstition, it’s the official government methodology for dealing with this insane pandemic.

We should be glad they haven’t claimed wearing 10 lbs of chain would reduce your chance of coming down with the Chicom lurgy.
Though the clanking around of the mask wearing chain encumbered flock might be mildly entertaining that 1st day I suppose.

Too bad that you aren’t in the states to buy a ticket because the Powerball drawing is up to $610 million.

My Ma always said it was good luck, so take it as a good omen, SWeasy…you’re starting the year off well.

I’ve heard the bird-poo/good luck story all my life, too.

As for eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, we do. In JavaMan’s family, the tradition is to put a clean new dime in the serving bowl. The person who finds the dime on their plate gets extra special good luck in the coming year.

It’s a silver sixpence in the Christmas pudding in Jolly Olde. Or was when Once B was a lad.

Hmmm – I think I heard about the whole bird-butt-luck thing watching some Brit-Com show… I suspect it started with some Mom trying to get her kid to stop crying at Brighton Beach one day some generations back. When it happened to his or her own kid years later grandma’s story was re-used… seeing that lots of people have gone to Brighton over the past few hundred years, and given the sea gull population, I can see how the story would spread over the entire population. There’s a math final exam question in there somewhere: given that England’s population is X and Y is the percentage of those who go to Brighton each year, Z is the sea gull population, and S is the hit rate per sea gull, how many years until….

Never mind. My brain hurts.

Anyhow our family always had to eat pork and sauerkraut at New Years and our odd custom required putting a little of each and every basic and necessary food in a box outside the front door of the house on New Year’s Eve. I am a little vague on this next part but I think that no one who visited on on New Year’s Eve ( or maybe New Year’s Day or maybe both) was allowed to leave without eating at least something…ideally as much as they wanted.

I once got crapped on by a pelican.

They are big birds. Their stools are massive.

Nothing good came of the incident.

It looks like Professor Plum. In the drawing room. With a candlestick. Through my scratched and well worn polycarbonate safety glass lenses. In a thick fog.

I heard the same thing after a seagull shat on me right before I checked onboard my first ship (USN) in my Dress Blues. Of all things, gotta make a very first impression and that happens. I was mortified.

@ Stoaty…they don’t make men like our grandfathers anymore. My Spousal Unit is all manly and stuff, but prickly as hell. That may go with being-in-charge-of-everthing-he-surveys. Lead, follow or get out of the way works for me.

The Southern side of the family ate a Smithfield ham and black-eyed peas with a dime and the Dutch side, ate smoked pork sausages with sauerkraut or pork-stuffed cabbage rolls on New Years Day…sometimes both.

There’s an old Dutch saying “the pig roots forward”. But the Dutch being practical folk know that the only thing wasted from a pig is the squeal and a jar of kraut is always on the table so the NYD meal was probably not an exception just more lavish. I still shudder at the thought of trotters and/or headcheese…which the older folks on both sides of the family loved.