Senior Moments: Why this is one New Year’s tradition I intend to keep

“You don’t want to know,” my mother would reply when I asked her what would happen if I didn’t eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day.

A transplanted New Yorker, my mother took this southern tradition to heart when the family relocated to Virginia.

No one in our family liked the peas. My brothers would just turn their heads at the mention of them, and my father would laugh. As for the New York family, well, you can only imagine. I was the only one who ate them. I’m not sure if I just felt sorry for my mother and didn’t want her to have to eat them alone, or I had inherited her proclivity for superstition.

Either way, each January 1, Mom and I found ourselves at the kitchen table eating a bowl of black-eyed peas. She mixed them with stewed tomatoes and served them over rice, and I actually got to like them. The notion that they might bring me good luck clinched it for me. I became a believer.

At college in the Blue Ridge Mountains, chili over rice was often served on cold winter nights. They kind of reminded me of the good luck peas, so I was one of the few students who didn’t complain about having it so often.

After my mother’s black-eyed peas companion moved to New York, she switched to a small can of the peas, and living alone in my apartment, I followed suit. A couple of times, we even planned the timing so we could eat them together while we talked on the phone. Eating the peas became a comfortable ritual that I continued no matter where I lived.

Until January 1, 2025, when for reasons I don’t recall, I didn’t buy the peas in advance, and the markets were all out of them.

“What happens if I don’t eat the peas, Mom?”

“You don’t want to know,” her words rang in my head.

You were right, Mom, and though you’ve been gone many years now, I promise never to disobey you again on any matters concerning superstitions.

This year I’m not taking any chances. I am making them from scratch.

Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on Patriciabunin.com