Why washing and cleaning on New Year's Day could give you bad luck
Don't try and use this as an excuse for not putting the bins out
It's a new dawn, new day, and an entirely new year.
We're now over a quarter of the way into the first century of the new millennium and time's remorseless march on stops for nothing in its quest to make us all feel old.
It's New Year's Day and for many people that means recovering from last night's party, but if your place is a bit of a tip and needs some cleaning, you might want to hold your horses for just a little while.
That's because it's apparently bad luck to be washing and cleaning on the first day of the calendar year, which sounds like a superstition made up by someone who just couldn't be arsed with tidying up for a while.
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This belief that it's bad luck to clean on New Year's Day most likely originates from China where it's thought that you run the risk of sweeping away the good luck stored up in your house for the coming year.
Again, your humble writer would opine that this superstition has come from someone trying to find a reason not to do some tidying up and resorted to claiming it would be 'bad luck'.
New Year traditions can occasionally be a bit weird, like the one which suggests you should crawl under a table and eat 12 grapes to represent a dozen resolutions you'll make for the year.
This is assuming you believe there are some cosmic forces judging each and every one of us for the strange things we do at strange times, rather than us being a bunch of apes clinging to a ball of rock hurtling through space with no cosmic force observing or tipping the scales.
This may not be a day for cleaning, but it is a day for clean-up because this is apparently the most popular day for sex in the calendar.
Some people seemingly can't help but start the year with a bang, and you'd hope they were hygienic about it both before and after to do all the stuff they don't show in the movies.
While there are people desperate to start 2026 the right way, there are some who ushered in the new year in a manner most foolish.
That's because instead of staying in and getting a takeaway they fell for a fake New Year's Eve party in Birmingham where crowds gathered for a fireworks display that was never going to happen.
Police had to show up and tell the gathered masses that there wasn't anything going on and they'd been duped, and it's not the first time hundreds of people have been hoodwinked by a fake party meant to usher in another year.
Anyway, whether you clean or not today, here's to the hope that 2026 is a good year for you.
Topics: Weird
Joe Harker