What people say
What you do on 1 January sets the pattern for the year: money in the house, no cleaning, no lending, specific foods for luck.Calendar · 30,090 searches a month
New Year superstitions
What you do on 1 January sets the pattern for the year: money in the house, no cleaning, no lending, specific foods for luck.
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Roman era for the January customs; most household versions 19th century
That makes it
about 176 years old
Rank by age
31 oldest of 40 dated here
Category
Calendar
Searched
30,090 a month
Romans exchanged figs and honey on the Kalends of January and treated the first day as a template for the year. The specific rules people follow now — what to eat, who enters first, what must not leave the house — were collected by folklorists in the 1800s, and vary by region more than any other set here.
What is going on
The largest cluster of superstitions by search volume, and the one most people follow while saying they do not believe in it. Behaviour on a date has no mechanism to affect the following twelve months.Where it applies. Universal, but the rules contradict each other between countries — lentils in Italy, twelve grapes in Spain, round fruit in the Philippines, no sweeping in China.
Other calendar superstitions
Recorded around the same time
New Year superstitions is the 31th oldest of the 40 dated superstitions here. Of those, 6 are younger than a century and 5 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →