Tag Archives: luck

Cuban New Year Traditions: Grapes, Water, and Roasted Pig

“So my dad’s thing, his folklore I guess, is that on New Year’s you eat 12 grapes, one for each month of the coming year. Each grape is basically a wish, a month of good luck. And then you fill up pots and pans with water and you throw the water out to get rid of all the bad luck from the year before. And you bang the pots together to scare away any bad energy, bad mojo. That’s his Cuban heritage, that’s where all of that comes from.

And then more generally, for any big holiday, it’s just about getting the whole extended family together. Like everyone comes. And the food is a huge part of it. The main thing you’re always going to have is roasted pig, and then black beans, rice, and fried plantains. It’s not a gathering without those. The food is really the center of everything, honestly. That’s just how those family holidays work.”

Context: This is from my friend whose father is Cuban. The informant was relaxed and a little giggly about it, clearly fond of these memories. It’s about the specific rituals their family does on New Year’s Eve, and then more broadly the way big family holidays just always look a certain way, same food every time, same people crowded around the same table. Someone in the room kept kicking them partway through, which did not help.

Analysis: The way he describes it shows that he is not quite sure what category it belongs in. But that slight distance actually makes it more interesting, because it shows how folk traditions get transmitted within families without ever being formally taught. Nobody sat this person down and explained the symbolism of the grapes or the water. They just grew up watching it happen, and now they know it.

The grape-eating and pot rituals are recognizable from Cuban and broader Latin American New Year’s tradition, but what stands out here is less the rituals themselves and more the fact that they’ve survived the distance of immigration intact, still tied to a specific identity, still understood as distinctly Cuban even several generations in. Throwing water out to expel bad luck, banging pots to scare off evil, these are physical, almost theatrical acts, and that probably has something to do with why they stick. They’re hard to forget once you’ve seen them.

The food side of things is doing something a little different. Roasted pig, black beans, rice, plantains showing up at every single holiday isn’t really about any one occasion. It’s more like a recurring proof of belonging. The meal is the same because the family is the same, and making it together, eating it together, is how that continuity gets felt rather than just assumed.

This entry was posted in Calendar Custom, Festival, Food, Family Folklore and tagged Cuban heritage, New Year’s, grapes, luck, roasted pig, family gathering, Latin American tradition on 0420.

Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck

Text: “Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck”

Context: Informant is 79, white, female, living in North Idaho. To this day if she sees a penny she’ll pick it up and smile, thinking of the old phrase. She can’t remember where she learned this but thinks she was very young. 

Analysis: This is folk speech that invokes magic “supersition”, picking up the penny means good luck and the specific outcome is having that luck all day. Coins are often used in magic superstitions, tossing a coin in a well, a penny having a bad luck side. It’s especially interesting because coins operate in a weird state in our economics, they are our most tangible form of money but have little in the way of monetary value especially now to the point of becoming almost obsolete. I believe it’s this inbetween between worthlessness and value that makes it the perfect thing for superstition to focus on. It has value, thus is special, but not enough to covet or protect Thus we assign them superstitious values. But more than that it’s something that clearly brings my grandmother joy, it’s an event you can’t control and thus that superstition brings that joy almost randomly. The rhyme in the saying also makes it feel whimsical, which could be a reason it’s stuck around for my grandmother.

Baseball Curses

Nationality: American

Occupation: Student

Residence: San Diego, CA

Text:
“There are tons of curses in baseball but the two main ones are the Curse of the Billy Goat and the Curse of the Bambino. The Curse of the Billy Goat was placed on the Chicago Cubs after a man brought his pet goat to Wrigley for a world series game. The goat was annoying the fans sitting around him so security very reasonably tried to kick the guy and his goat out. This enraged the man, who declared that the Cubs would never win the World Series ever again. It took 108 years but the Cubs finally broke the curse in 2016. The other major curse is the curse of the Bambino, which happened to the Boston Red Sox after they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. It’s impossible to know why they would even consider trading the greatest player ever to their arch rivals, and after making the trade in 1920 they didn’t win the World Series until 2004.”

Context:

My friend described both of these curses as if they were fact, which he later justified by saying that there’s no way a team could go 108 years without winning a World Series unless they had been cursed. In general my friend takes a very analytical approach to baseball, and he is very interested in advanced statistics and sabermetrics, which made it more surprising he would accept superstition as fact. He said that the baseball community overall accepts both of these curses as being real, undeniable things that happened. When I asked him more about this he brought up multiple incidents that were “proof” that the curses were real. For the Red Sox he mentioned the Bucky F. Dent incident, where the worst hitter on the Yankees hit a home run to eliminate the Red Sox, and the Bill Buckner incident where a horrible error by the Red Sox’s first baseman allowed the Mets to beat the Red Sox in the World Series. For the Cubs he mentioned the Steve Bartman incident, where a Cubs fan interfered with play which led to a late inning meltdown eliminating the Cubs from the playoffs. Despite my friend being focused on the analytical, statistically backed aspects of baseball he firmly believes that these curses are real.

Analysis:

Like my friend, I am also interested in statistics. Out of curiosity I calculated the odds of a team going 108 years without winning a World Series because on the surface that feels like an impossibly long drought. Surprisingly, the odds of any one team not winning over a 108 year stretch is 57%, meaning that it is more likely than not for a team to suffer that long of a drought. This statistical quirk, combined with the incidents my friend listed when I questioned him, reveal a lot about how superstitions form. First, it feels impossible for a team to go 108 years without winning (even though the opposite is true), which leads to people questioning how that can happen. This leads to a theory being formed, in this case the theory being that these teams are cursed. Once the theory is formed, confirmation bias leads to random events being attributed to the curse. So many superstitions spawn from a desire to have a better understanding of the world, and in this case the superstitions appeared out of a desire to understand counterintuitive statistics.

Standing at a Baseball Game

Nationality: American

Occupation: Student

Residence: San Diego, CA

Text: 

“Standing while at a baseball game during a big moment jinxes it. And you jinx it more the earlier you stand. Like with runners on in a close game, if you stand at the beginning of the plate appearance that’s the biggest jinx possible. Or standing when Diaz (the New York Mets closer) starts a plate appearance. I don’t stand until it’s 3-2 bases loaded game 7 OR the guy in front of me stands.”

Context:
My friend is an enormous Mets fan. He has season tickets so he goes to almost every home game when he is not at college, and watches most away games on television. When I asked him what happens if you stand too early, he did not list any specific incidents, but did give specific theoretical events, such as an overexcited crowd causing the Mets closer to give up a home run or for their star first baseman to strike out. This is not a commonly held belief, it is shared between my friend and his father. It is also worth noting that my friend is very tall, so if he stands up it would be difficult for the person behind him to see.
Analysis:
This superstition is a reflection of how magical thinking is often born out of a desire to have control over events that are otherwise out of our hands. The interesting thing about this superstition is that the action he takes contradicts the rest of the crowd. While everyone else stands, he remains seated. By taking this individual action, he has an individual feeling of control over the outcome of the game, despite having no real influence on the result. This superstition could not exist if it was a widely held belief; it only exists because it allows my friend to feel a sense of individual control over something beyond his reach.

The George Santos Curse

Nationality: American

Occupation: Student

Residence: San Diego, CA

Text:

In March of 2023, just before opening day, Congressman George Santos published a video on Twitter wearing a Mets jersey where he incorrectly chanted “Let’s go Mets”. This video was posted while he was enveloped in an enormous fraud scandal, which would ultimately lead to him being expelled from Congress and sentenced to seven years in prison. The moment that the video was released, my friend was convinced that George Santos had just cursed the Mets for the 2023 season. Despite starting the year as World Series favorites, the Mets went on to win less than half of their games and miss the playoffs. In 2024 after George Santos was expelled from Congress, the Mets unexpectedly made a playoff run which was proof to my friend that Santos cursed the Mets and the curse was lifted when he was gone.

Context:
My friend lives in New York’s third congressional district, which is the district Santos represented and where the Mets play home games. He was not old enough to vote when Santos was elected, but he hated him and wanted him to be removed from office. After Santos posted the cringeworthy video on Twitter, jokes appeared online that he had just cursed the Mets and that the Mets could never win with him in office. My friend latched onto this idea, and throughout the season whenever the Mets lost he would text me about how the George Santos curse is killing the Mets.

Analysis:

This belief is a clear example of Frazer’s idea of the Law of Similarity in magic. The Law of Similarity states that a magician will produce a desired effect by mimicking it. In this case George Santos was (unintentionally) the magician, and he transferred the negativity surrounding himself onto the Mets by wearing their jersey. Following this idea, it makes sense that the curse would be lifted after Santos was expelled. Prior to being expelled from office Santos was hated for being a fraudster, but after he was expelled people began to find him amusing. This changing energy surrounding Santos was reflected in the Mets turnaround, where they unexpectedly had a great season in 2024.