According to the Wikipedia entry, the origin of this custom in unknown but it can be traced back to perhaps the 15th century, maybe even the 13th - good heavens! And it came from England, which makes sense since that is where my grandmother’s family came from.
I went directly to my computer and Googled “rabbit+first day of the month” and up came a variety of sites that referred to this strange habit. And finally realized that in this new world of instant information, I finally have the means to answer that question. This morning, I woke up and spoke the word to the silence around me. Over 400 Essential Things to See and Do! Yankee’s New England Adventures is your go-to source for in-depth travel information, with the same stunning photography and practical know-how Yankee brings to you every month. But no one can explain to me why we say Rabbit and where the tradition came from. Another who feels that one must say the word twice, as in, Rabbit, Rabbit, for the luck to stick. More recently, I’ve discovered a few friends who also indulge in this strange habit, one who not only says Rabbit every month but who also collects rabbit figurines of all sizes and of all material, paper and stone not excluded. My only answer was “from my grandmother,” which, of course, is the short answer. Whenever I mentioned this custom to friends, they would usually ask me where that came from.
Now that I have written that down, I realize how spooky it sounds, as if we were a bunch of paleolithic cave people, clinging to the earth by virtue of luck and whimsy. The superstition was that if you forgot to say rabbit, spoken as the first word on the first day of the month, you would have bad luck that month. My mother was complicit so I didn’t realize it was not her tradition, growing up, but rather something she adopted once she married my father. In my mind, my grandmother was the originator of the tradition, and it extended to all my aunts and uncles and cousins on my father’s side of the family.
On the morning of the first day of every month, there was a slow chorus in our house, from room to room, the word “Rabbit” was spoken one and then another until we had all been granted our month’s worth of good luck. I grew up thinking that our family was the only family with this strange tradition. Rabbit Rabbit! Why do people say “Rabbit, Rabbit!” on the first day of the month?
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