Don’t Do Laundry on New Year’s Day or a Family Member Could Die

There are a lot of New Year's superstitions.  Eat black-eyed peas and cabbage, open your doors and windows at midnight to let the old year out, even touching the floor with your right foot when you first get out of bed are all long-held practices that supposedly bring you good luck.

There are also things you can do on the first day of the year that will (once again, supposedly) bring you bad luck and calamities for all of 2020.  One of the most obscure is the laundry rule.  According to the old wives tales collected by website The Spruce, if you wash your clothes, towels, bedding etc. on the first day of the year - you are in for a whole heap of trouble.  Specifically:

• A member of the family will be washed away (die) during the coming year.
• It will wash a year of good fortune down the drain.
• You will have more laundry than usual to do all year.

So, if you were looking for another reason to lay about the house doing nothing on January 1st - maybe it's time to get superstitious.  I mean, you can't be too careful.