Happy New Year, My Friends!

My daughter just remarked, “You’ve got to start somewhere, you know?”

Great quote, and so true.

For New Year’s, we’re starting with black-eyed peas. We can’t turn away from our family’s southern heritage, and this year, Hannah did the cooking. Black-eyed peas, red pepper, collards, parsley, onion and green onion, hot sauce, sharp white cheddar = new year’s good luck at our house.

Just in case you don’t keep the faith with the black-eyed peas, here’s a Mega Million ticket.

My Irish, Scottish, Southern mother also believed in sweeping all the money in the house over the doorstep at the stroke of midnight. Apparently this signifies a prosperous new year. The year she inaugurated that old tradition into our family turned into the most dire of our lives and my brother and I physically restrained her from repeating it the following year.  

Since its a time to court luck we’ll also invoke Bill’s Irish grandmother’s tradition and serve salt cod for New Year’s Eve.

I’ve never been one to write New Year’s resolutions. It’s not that I don’t make resolutions – I just don’t make them on December 31^st or January 1^st and I don’t call them resolutions. Years ago I read Deepak Chopra’s book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success www.chopra.com/sslos Every night when I meditated I affirmed that I wanted to live closer to nature. It was a resolution of sorts, and two years later I was living on a houseboat, in the water, in the bay. Made me a believer.

My current affirmation is to pay attention to what is important and let go of the trivial. Let’s hope I have the wisdom to know the difference. There’s more – but I’m superstitious so we’ll leave it at that.

Now, a bowl of those black-eyed peas, please. Because…you’ve got to start somewhere, you know?