Eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, and grey peas on Ash Wednesday, and you will have money in your pocket all the year round.
If you want to have extra good luck to your dairy, give your bunch of mistletoe to the first cow that calves after New Year’s Day.
Turn the money in your pocket on the first sight of the new moon, and you will always have plenty there. Should your pocket be empty you can only avert the lady moon’s displeasure by turning head over heels immediately.
Again, look at the first new moon of the year through a silk handkerchief which has never been washed. As many moons as you see through the handkerchief (the threads multiplying the vision), so many years will pass ere you are married. But it is very unlucky to see the new moon through a window-pane. A friend tells me she has known a maidservant shut her eyes when closing the shutters unless she should unexpectedly catch sight of it through the glass.
Throughout Northumberland this couplet is said and believed in:
A Saturday’s moon and a Sunday’s prime
Never brought good in any man’s time.
Again, courtesy to the moon when first you see her after the change, and you will get a present before the moon is out. It must be done three times, and not through glass. This last is a Durham superstition. A Yorkshire lady informs me that in her childhood she was accustomed to repeat the following lines while looking at the first new moon of the year through a silk handkerchief:
New moon, new moon, I hail thee,
New moon, new moon, be kind to me,
If I marry man or man marry me,
Show me how many moons it will be.
Another variation of the practice runs thus: “At the first appearance of the first new moon of the year go out in the
