6 Ways To Greet the New Year - hoppin john and other traditions

A New Take on First-Footing

A few years ago, some new friends and I were having a low key New Years Eve in the Berkshires, when I remembered a family New Years tradition from my childhood - on the stroke of midnight, we had carried across the threshold things we wanted in our home and life in the new year.

A little googling reveals that my family’s custom is drawn from a bit of British folklore called “first-footing.”  The first person to cross the threshold of a house in the new year - ideally a dark-haired man bearing gifts - is said to bring good luck to the home and its inhabitants. Traditional gifts included a coin for wealth, bread for nourishment, salt for flavor, coal for warmth, greenery for health, and whisky for fun. A household’s members could wait and hope for the right visitor to arrive bringing the appropriate items, or take matters into their own hands and troop across the threshold themselves at the stroke of midnight.

Get this ancient tradition working for you this year.  First, to get all the luck on your side, enlist a dark-haired man.  If don’t have a real live one handy, a biography of Abraham Lincoln or a Cary Grant DVD could be a plausible stand-in. Then spend some time thinking about what you’d like more of in your life in 2009.  Gather the traditional symbols, or replace them with alternatives: a kitchen scale for balance, a rock for perspective, an olive for peace. This year, we’re carrying an envelope for opportunity, legos for ingenuity, an apple for health, whisky, and Willa (we definitely want more of her in 2009).  And we’ll be tucking dollar bills into our back pocket while we’re at it., just in case.

Here are few other fun and thrifty ways to bring good luck in the new year:

Eat Hoppin’ John
Black-eyed peas and rice are an old new year’s culinary tradition: “eat poor that day, eat rich the rest of the year,” the saying goes.
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Write a New Year’s Haiku
Do this on your own, or join in with this group Haiku writing celebration:
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