Black-Eyed Peas Please

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day?

The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865.

When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals.

The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles.

But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork.

As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck.

The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies.

According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year.

Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune.

Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage.

Cornbread , a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat, symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate.

You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup.

Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year.

Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth.

So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

This was what your Southern kinfolk did and reflected upon every year.

We wanted to share these traditions with our friends not from the South.

~Southern Arkansas Heritage Museum

Sourced from Facebook: Becca Abell Mutz Dec 26, 2023 accessed January 1, 2024

For those who keep up this tradition. My mama shared this with me, and I had to share it with the rest of yall.

For some strange reason, New Years is full of traditions like this eating of black-eyed peas that will supposedly bring good luck. I did a fun one with my North Carolina family where we ate grapes under a table. It was an excuse to be a little silly and have fun as a family but it got me questioning why we do so many strange things in order to attempt to bring good luck. These are some things I began to recognize.

New Years is a beautiful reminder of a brand new start. See we supposedly get one every single day, a clean slate covered by the grace and forgiveness of our Heavenly Father. However this specific day’s clean slate seems to impact so many of us harder than the mundane ever repeating days of our lives. So we do all these things to make sure we take advantage of our clean slate: we make resolutions of the future year and take inventory of the year prior. For those who don’t know, inventory is a Celebrate Recovery term and basically means to reminiscence of what’s happened, remember our favorite memories, lessons we’ve learned, and acknowledge wrongs we’ve done and people we’ve hurt, etc. We step out of our denial and recognize how we could improve, we take a moment to be grateful for what we have, and we make a plan for how to proceed. New Year’s Eve is often filled with rituals and traditions to accomplish these things. We surround ourselves with loved ones and take time to celebrate. So many beautiful procedures for making the most out of our clean slate.

We then cheapen these attempts to become better by saying these are things we do to bring good luck.

I don’t know about you but I’m starting to recognize how this might be a genius tactic of the enemy to cheapen what is actually going on here! See I don’t believe in luck but I still participate in many of these traditions and little quirks… why? I honestly didn’t know at first. Until I realized that this wasn’t at all about bringing in good luck. So what are we actually doing with all these quirky traditions?

If you take note of this story with the black eyed peas, they talk about how they had to make do with what they had. That doesn’t sound like good luck at all. That sounds like resourcefulness. That sounds like choice. That sounds like resilience.

Then it dawned on me, this isn’t at all traditions and habits to bring good luck! Remember how I talked about inventory earlier! We are taught in recovery how to do inventory quite a bit more. There’s different levels of intensity too. You have daily inventory, where you are just taking note of how you did for that day. What did you learn, is there anything you should apologize for, what are you grateful for and what was hard, etc. I try to do an easy daily inventory with my kids. It helps us reset and get ready for the following day.

There’s also life inventory, when we look at our life story or map; what have we learned and what’s gone wrong, any apologies we need to say or to accept, what are we grateful for and what can we do to not grip onto the painful memories as tightly. This type usually takes a little more work, sometimes a good friend or counselor, and a lot more time. It’s so worth it though! And it’s not a once in a lifetime deal either.

So why do we do inventory? Because it brings healing. It helps us to recognize our blessings, it helps us to perceive things in a better light, it helps situate our brains so we can make more rational choices.

I confess I have so much to learn about inventory, I’m not confessing to have all of the answers. However I am saying that perhaps we should stop giving Satan power over our clean slates. Truth of the matter is none of us will have good luck. It doesn’t exist. This life is hard! Bad things will happen!

However, you have the chance to be thriving in the midst of chaos when you choose to empower your clean slates. Yes, I said that plural. Every day, do some inventory, take time to be grateful, recognize the lessons you need to learn. When New Years comes around, we can recognize that some of these little traditions like eating black eyed peas are to remind us of the choices our ancestors made. They could have called it hopeless when they had no food left. They could have cried out to God, maybe even with an undertone of anger, saying how dare you let this happen. They could have pouted and just sat in the dirt like Jonah waiting for death to overcome. But no, they were resilient. They chose to count their blessings and recognize that they could use the horse feed to eat. They chose to make the most of what they had. They chose to continue forward in faith, believing that God will provide.

Perhaps eating grapes under a table is just a silly TikTok trend. Or perhaps it’s a way to choose to be still, step away from the normality of this life, do something different and unite with loved ones, recognizing just how much there is to be grateful for. But I am not going to allow the enemy to delude me any further. This is not about luck. This is about choice.

So, what are you choosing this year?