The Price of Luck in China

A preference for lucky numbers costs Chinese consumers the equivalent of $6 billion per year -- a little more than 1 percent of the country's entire gross domestic product. So says Zili Yang, a professor of economics at SUNY-Binghampton.

Like American travelers who avoid the 13th floor in hotels, Chinese shoppers tend to avoid anything beginning or ending with the number 4 -- si in Chinese, a homophone for "death." It's no coincidence, for example, that the Encore hotel in Las Vegas skips Floors 40 through 49; Chinese high-rollers won't take those rooms. On the other hand, 8 (ba in Chinese, which sounds like fa, meaning "prosperity") and 6 (a word suggesting smoothness) are widely considered lucky.

According to Yang, retailers in China simply jack up their prices to avoid 4 as the first or last digit. Yang analyzed prices for more than 11,000 Beijing area products, including food, electronics, and clothing. He found 8 statistically over-represented and 4 under-represented. "The use of superstitious numbers in pricing and the exploitation of superstition in retail sales is more than a cultural phenomenon," Yang concludes. "Given its ubiquity, the use of superstitious numbers in prices should not be viewed as a mere marketing gimmick, either."

Visitation

Lampshade Jesus, Feb 24, 2012.

Jesus appeared in my family room the other night. If you don't believe me, then just take a close look at this photo, snapped by my daughter's boyfriend. (Thanks, Justin!) Pay attention to the lampshade in the foreground.  Notice the lower part of Jesus' face? See the dark outline of his neatly trimmed beard and mustache? Of course you do!

You see Jesus because your mind is hard-wired to recognize patterns, especially faces. Studies have shown that one-hour-old infants will follow pretty much anything that looks vaguely like face, so long as it has two eyes on top of a nose. A simple circle with two dots aligned horizontally over one dot in the center (a smiley face without the smile) will do to catch a newborn's attention.

What does all this have to do with superstition? Only that we continually seek patterns -- not just perceptually, but cognitively as well. We can't help it. Whether it's Jesus in a lampshade, camels in clouds, or  lucky sweaters before a test, our brains make connections to interpret our experiences.

Unfortunately, Lampshade Jesus vanishes whenever you change the lighting in my family room or change your angle of vision -- not like, say, the grilled-cheese sandwich bearing an image of the Virgin Mary "found" by a Florida Woman in 1994. Ten years later, the online casino GoldenPalace.com bought it for $28,000.    

Courage Under Fire

Three on a match: serious stuff

Superstitions and rituals flourish during wartime. Like sailors, gamblers, and athletes, soldiers going into combat must learn to live with uncertainty and chance -- except in a soldier's case, chance can get you killed.

"I'm not a superstitious man," British Major Richard Streatfield told the BBC two years ago, just before returning from service with NATO forces in Afghanistan. "But as this tour progressed, I've noticed that there is an increasingly superstitious element that has crept in. I've listened to the same piece of music every night for the last three months." He tells of fellow Brits wearing talismans and a platoon commander putting on his boots in the same order every day. "Inexplicable," says Streatfield, "except for the fact that it has become his ritual. There are a hundred more -- the small rituals  of those who need everything to be on their side."

Facing the chaos of combat, soldiers do everything possible to control what is in their power to control. They clean, maintain, and prep their equipment as if their lives depended on it, because their lives do depend on it. They rely on their training. They trust their brothers in arms. But they also know that their survival often depends on sheer dumb luck, and for that they turn to ritual. For them, superstition becomes a way to cope with stress and to cultivate the illusion of control. It's no laughing matter. It's what keeps them going, day after day.

I don't know whether Corporal Jaime Pilcher has studied psychology, but the military convoy driver offered an insightful explanation of his superstitious rituals to the American Forces Network in Afghanistan.  "When you're going on a mission, you're always thinking about the worst," he says. "So if you come back from a successful mission, nothing happening, you basically try and repeat that. I get in my truck the same way. I listen to the same song."

Do soldiers truly believe that their talismans and rituals protect them? It doesn't matter. And if you asked them, I'm not sure whether they could tell you honestly. Talismans and rituals are tools, just like rifles and MREs, and they're trusted until they fail.

During the first Gulf War, Giora Keinan of the University of Tel Aviv studied Israeli civilians who endured Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks -- random death falling out of the sky almost every night. Like soldiers, many of them turned to superstitious rituals and magical thinking to cope with the stress. "It is of interest to note," concluded Keinan, "that persons who hold magical beliefs or who engage in magical rituals are often aware that their thoughts, actions, or both are unreasonable and irrational. Despite this awareness, they are unable to rid themselves of this behavior." I have to ask: under the circumstances, why would they want to?

No. 13 and the Bottom Line (Pt. 2)

Triskaidekaphobia seems to have an economic impact that reaches beyond the travel, tourism, and hotel industries. In Ireland, Michael Healy-Rae (a member of the Teachta Dala, or Irish parliament) has proposed the changing that country's entire automobile registration system before 2013. He fears that superstitious buyers might put off new-car purchases for 12 full months to avoid getting stuck with the number 13 on their license plates.

Healy-Rae raised the possibility after hearing from car dealers who've already started to worry about next year's sales. Apparently, the Society for the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) supports his idea. A slumping economy has devastated auto sales, which have dropped from 180,000 units per year to about 75,000. "Even if it was 5 percent of the people [who opted against buying a 2013 car], in a market of 75,000 [new cars per year] that would be a real problem," a SIMI spokesman told a leading Irish newspaper.

In this case, personal superstitions might drive not only economic demand, but also public policy.

No. 13 and the Bottom Line (Pt. 1)

Today marks the one-month anniversary of the Costa Concordia disaster. In January, on Friday the 13th,  the Italian cruise ship ran aground off the Tuscan coast only hours after it had left the port of Civitavecchia; 17 people died in the ensuing chaos, and 15 others remain missing and presumed dead.

By putting to sea on a Friday the 13th, the Concordia defied a longstanding tradition in the industry. Cruise lines generally avoid setting out  voyages on that "unlucky" day -- not because they're superstitious, but because so many discretionary travelers are. It's a tough ticket to sell.

For the same reason, most hotels don't have a floor numbered 13. They'll put a restaurant between 12 and 14, or the spa, or the fitness center, and call it "Restaurant Level" or "M" or anything but its proper number. Even guests who don't claim to be superstitious would prefer to book a room on another floor, so why waste the space? Otis Elevator claims that 85% of the commercial properties in which it installs equipment don't have a floor numbered 13.

More than a mere personal quirk, triskaidekaphobia drives demand for certain goods and services -- and those providers recognize and accommodate it, rather than letting it affect their bottom line.

Charms 'R Us

Kids live by superstitions. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Blow the seeds of a dandelion, make your wishes come true. Cross your fingers for good luck.

With children's lives so rife with ritual, do we really need to give them more? But that's exactly what two psychologists at the University of Kansas did with a bunch of preschoolers back in the 1980s.  Gregory Wagner and Edward Morris rounded up a dozen kids, raging in age from 3 to 6 years,  to see whether they could condition superstition.

One by one, Wagner and Morris ushered the kids went into a tiny room, no bigger that a closet, specially built for the experiment. Against one of the walls stood a pint-size mechanical clown named Bobo, who dropped marbles out of his mouth into a chute.  The kids were told to catch the marbles and collect them in a box. If they collected enough marbles by the end of the session, explained the researchers, they could choose one of the 50-cent plastic animals from a collection on display outside the room.

"Sometimes Bobo will give you marbles, and sometimes Bobo won't give you marbles," the researchers told the kids. But they didn't tell the kids that Bobo would or would not give out marbles regardless of what the kids did. In fact, Bobo would spit marbles at regular intervals (every 15 or 30 seconds, depending on the session), like clockwork.

So,Wagner and Morris left a 4-, 5-, or 6-year-old alone in a closet with a marble-gobbing clown for 10 minutes at a time, while they and their colleagues watched through a two-way mirror and videotaped what happened.  And what happened was this: at least 7 of the 12 kids apparently came to believe that they could influence Bobo. They spontaneously tried various stunts -- making faces, touching or kissing the clown's big red nose, patting its cheeks with one or both hands, wriggling their hips back or forth, or even shimmying as if they were spinning an invisible hula-hoop. And if the clown happened to deliver immediately after a particular performance, the kid would repeat the performance and keep repeating it -- expecting to get a marble, connecting his or her ritual with the reward.

"In summary," Wagner and Morris concluded, "the present study...produced behavior similar to that which has been called 'superstitious.'" Kids as young as three and half looked for patterns between their behavior and external events,  found them, and inferred a cause-effect relationship -- albeit a specious one.

Well, most of them did. Three of the children did so little inside the room that the researchers couldn't really tell whether they were acting superstitiously. One little girl simply sat there and smiled. And one five-year-old boy just sucked his thumb. Wagner and Morris didn't note whether these two kids bothered to collect any marbles. But it doesn't matter, because everyone got a toy in end.

Operators Are Standing By

A collection of Russian Orthodox icons.

This week, The Moscow Times reports that the Russian Orthodox Church plans to open an "anti-superstition hot line" to set callers straight on the difference between superstition and religion. Staffed by trained theologians, the free service aims to clarify practices officially sanctioned by the church. "We want people to be able to get to a clear response with no superstition, which arises as a result of ignorance," said a church spokesperson. The church will make the hot line available throughout Russia if it succeeds in the Moscow test market.

It's about time. We've had psychic hot lines for a long while. Why not superstition hot lines?  

Aside from sounding like a great premise for a Saturday Night Live skit with Father Guido or the Church Lady ("Who you gonna call? Spellbusters!"), the Russian phone-in service strikes me as a fascinating ecclesiastical departure. Like most organized religions, Christianity has historically co-opted or absorbed folklore and superstition from various cultures, leading to richly diverse religious practices. Think of how the ancient Britons' ritual animal sacrifices evolved into All-Hallows' Eve (Halloween) in England, or the Aztecs' memorials to their ancestors became the Day of the Dead in Meso-America. I wonder why the Russian Orthodox Church now feels so threatened by what it calls superstition.

A Bold Prediction

I'm going out on a limb. With about 10 hours remaining before kickoff, I predict the New York Giants will beat the new England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI. The reason? That hoariest of all football cliches: Intangibles.

Who cares that Gisele Bundchen e-mailed her friends and family, asking them to pray for husband Tom Brady and the Patriots? Brady hasn't won the Big One since taking up with the Brazilian supermodel. He lost in the AFC title game (2007), got beat by the Giants in Super Bowl XLII (2008), missed the entire next season with a knee injury, threw three interceptions in a first-round playoff loss (2010), and again failed to get past the first playoff game last year. Unlike some New England fans, I'm not calling Gisele a jinx. I'm just looking for patterns.

The Giants, on the other hand, seem to understand the role of superstition in sports. Not so much their owner, Steve Tisch, who claims to believe in the power of toenail polish. He let his daughters paint his toenails Giants' colors -- red and blue -- over a month ago, and the team hasn't lost since. Tisch has decided not remove the lucky polish until after the game, which must cause him untold grief at the gym.

No, I'm counting on pizza to give the Giants an edge. According to the New York Post, the Giants' offensive linemen had pies from a particular New Jersey pizzeria flown to Indianapolis for their traditional Friday after-practice snack. They even made special arrangements with the TSA to get the lucky pizzas through security fast. Obviously, this is a team that respects its pregame superstitions.

And clean cars. Yahoo Sports reports that Giants' kicker Lawrence Tynes "superstitiously" washes his car by hand on the morning before every big home game. "You can really get into it and use it to take your mind off things," Tynes told Yahoo, describing his Zen-like approach. An Indianapolis car dealer has even offered this garage to Tynes so that the kicker can use a rag and bucket inside if the weather's too cold for outdoor washing this morning.

Studies show that winning sports teams tend to have more superstitions than losing teams. In the Giants' case, you can dismiss the weekly pizza parties and pregame car washing as superstitions. Or you can call them  bonding rituals and meditative exercises. I call them intangibles, and I'm going with New York.

Practical Magic

Voltaire

Up until the early 20th century, pretty much everybody thought of superstition as "other people's religion." For instance, Voltaire famously pointed out that the difference between superstition and religion is just a matter of perspective. One sect's religion is another sect's superstition, he wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764).

But a Polish anthropologist named Bronislaw Malinowski changed all that. In the 19-teens, he became one of the first cultural scholars to actually live among the people whom he studied; up until then, most ivory tower folks worked secondhand, relying on accounts from adventurers, explorers, traders, and such. For that reason alone, you've got to love the guy. But there's more. He was also one of the first to think seriously and scientifically about the difference between superstition and religion.

The Bron

Living and working among the tribes of the Trobriand Islands -- an archipelago off the east coast of New Guinea -- Malinowski made a distinction between the ceremonies performed to mark births, deaths, marriages, and other milestone events for the community and the rituals practiced on more mundane occasions. The former he thought of as "religion"; the latter, "magic." For Malinowski, magic differed from religion in several important respects: 

• Idiosyncrasy. "Religion is the concern of the community," wrote The Bron. By contrast, superstition or magic is practiced and performed by individuals in ways often peculiar to themselves. In other words, superstition is religion by the individual, for the individual.
• Practicality. "Magic is a practical art consisting of acts which are only means to a definite end expected to follow later on," he wrote in the essay "Magic, Science, and Religion" (1954). Uncertainty plays an important role in superstition; whenever the success of an activity depended largely on chance or accident, the islanders turned to magic. Religion, on the other hand, "is a body of self-contained acts being themselves the fulfillment of their purpose" -- their purpose being the continuation of tradition or the goal of transcendence. (I know, that makes the title of this post a redundancy. So what?)

• Danger. "We find magic wherever the element of danger is conspicuous," Malinowski concluded. For example, when the Trobriand Islanders fished in the familiar confines of their lagoon, they went about their business casually. But when they ventured out into the open sea, far from home, they practiced a variety of rituals before their trip to ensure safe passage.

Malinowski found real value in magic. "It enables man to carry out with confidence his most vital tasks and to maintain his poise and mental integrity under circumstances which would ... demoralize him by despair and anxiety, by fear and hatred." In other words, it gives people the illusion of control -- an idea that psychologists would explore in depth and detail some 50 years later.

Can the State Outlaw Superstition?

After simmering for more than a decade, a debate over  superstition bubbled into full boil in India last month. Legislators in Maharashtra -- a huge state on India's west coast, which includes the nation's most populous city, Mumbai -- prepared to consider a bill that would  make superstition and "blind faith" criminal offenses.

The bill would outlaw not only animal sacrifices, supernatural cures, and healing practices not supported by science; it would also ban the sale of charms, potions, amulets, and other objects purporting to bring good luck or magic powers.

Maharashtra's anti-superstition effort dates back to 1999, when a similar measure was indefinitely tabled. The most recent bill has been languishing in the legislature since 2003. It finally passed in 2010, but requires approval of the central government to take effect. And that's what the current brouhaha is all about.

Supporters of the anti-superstition law see it as a public-health and consumer-protection issue. Opponents -- including many devout Hindus, Janists, and Muslims -- say the definition of  superstition seems too broad and would outlaw certain religious rituals.  The Indian press reported widespread public protests in Maharashtra in December, as the central government prepared to consider the law.

Besides showing that religion mixes with politics in places other than the United States, the proposed Indian law highlights a key question: what's the difference between religion and superstition? Between a rite of faith and an act of magic? Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have wrestled with the question for well over a century. To the Indian officials now struggling with it, I say: Lots of luck. You'll need it.

Meanwhile, where would you start to separate the two?

Luckyball

Moneyball came out on DVD last week. Like most really good sports movies, it's only superficially about sports. Based on the bestseller by Michael Lewis, it tells how the 2002 Oakland Athletics won 103 games (including a record-breaking 20 in a row) and their division title after losing their three best players to free agency.  Actually, the movie explores the tension between faith and reason, and how that tension affects the way we work and play.

Income inequality in Major League Baseball forced Oakland’s general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) to re-think his roster. How could small-market teams like the A’s compete with big-market teams like the New York Yankees? With three times the cash to spend, the Yanks could outbid the Oaklands of the league for the best athletes. An awkward computer geek fresh out of Yale (Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill) convinces Beane that the answer lies in finding undervalued players – guys who produce out of proportion to their salaries, as revealed by sophisticated statistical analyses. Instead of relying on subjective evaluations by his scouts, Beane decides to go with Brand’s cold, hard numbers.

The movie gets big yuks from the old-timers’ unscientific approach to judging players. The old talent scouts give a thumbs-up to a prospect with “a good face,” thumbs-down to ones with less attractive girlfriends. (“He can’t do better than her? Shows a lack of confidence.”)

But when the team goes for its record-setting 20th consecutive win, even the converted number-crunchers fall back into magical thinking. Beane, on the road to scout a prospect, gets a frantic call on his cell phone from Brand, who begs him to get back to his habitual place in the stadium – presumably, for luck. Beane thinks over his options for a second, and we can almost hear his inner voice saying, “Well, what the hell, it can’t hurt.” He turns his pickup around, and we next see him watching the game on TV somewhere in the bowels of Oakland stadium. And, in true Hollywood fashion, a player who was signed not for his power but for his on-base percentage wins the game with a walk-off homer.

Michael Lewis has said that his book explores how "an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method." To the book’s credit – and to the movie’s – it also shows how even the most science-minded folks tenaciously hold onto their superstitions, especially in a superstition-laden sport like baseball. Ironically, it's Brand the Science Guy who implores Beane to get back to Oakland for luck. Or maybe it's not ironic at all. After all, don't science and superstition spring from the same impulse -- the drive to find patterns in the past and present that will predict the future? Whether we find the patterns in numbers or in behavior, it doesn't matter. The drive is still there, hard-wired in us.

Moneyball shows people who put their faith in computers hedging their bets with good-luck rituals when, as the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski put it, the stakes are high and the outcome is uncertain. In other words, it shows people acting like people.

So, You Think You're Not Superstitious?

Would you call yourself superstitious? Before you answer, consider these questions honestly:

• Before you landed here and saw the photo above, did you notice that today is Friday the 13th? Or did you take note of the date several days ago? Have you mentioned it to anyone, even casually? And have you done anything special – or avoided doing something – to keep your luck today?

• Do you ever “knock wood”?

• Do you own an article of clothing or piece of jewelry that you consider lucky?

• Do you make a wish on your birthday? (Oh, you don't think of that as a superstition? Don’t pretend to claim that it’s “goal-setting.” Why else do you try to blow out the candles with one breath? Who says that we don't pick up superstitions from our culture?)

• Have you ever gone out of your way to do something – other than studying – before a big test in school, just for luck? 

• Do you hesitate to speak ill of another person, for fear that what you say might come true?

• Do you ever avoid talking with others about a plan or hope – say, a promising new job that you’ve applied for  – for fear of jinxing it?

Now, do you still think you’re immune to superstition?

Where You Stand
Only one in four Americans admits to being superstitious, when asked by Gallup pollsters on the telephone. In fact, nearly half of the people surveyed claim to hold no superstitious beliefs whatsoever.

Frankly, I doubt those numbers. Like any survey that relies solely on self-assessment, Gallup’s doesn’t just invite skepticism; it positively screams out for it. The very word “superstition” is so pejorative, few will fess up to it, especially to a stranger on the phone. Face it – would you admit to holding “a belief, based on fear and ignorance, that is inconsistent with the known laws of science or with what is generally considered true and rational”? That’s how Webster’s defines superstition.  You might as well confess that you’re crazy. If you answered the questions above honestly, I'd bet you doubt Gallup's conclusions, too.

When Numbers Get Serious

Chapter 9 tells of Cain's fascination with 45.

Since Herman Cain’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination flamed out last month, copies of his autobiography are probably headed for remainder tables in Dollar Stores all over the country. Where else would you expect to find a book called  This Is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House, given the journey's abrupt and ignominious end? Even at only a buck, the book isn't worth reading – that is, until you get to Chapter 9.  “‘Forty-Five’ – A Very Special Number” details Cain’s fascinating foray into numerology. As far as I know, no presidential candidate has ever revealed his peculiar superstitions so frankly and unabashedly.

Cain attaches special significance to 45, and he finds it everywhere. He had planned to become the 45th president of the United States in 2013, 45 years after graduating from college and 45 years after marrying his wife Gloria.  A Reader’s Digest article that significantly influenced his thinking was published in 1945. He gave memorable 645-word speeches. Another important speech was interrupted by applause 45 times. And so on.

“I’m not a devout numerologist, but my mathematical training does cause me recognize when numbers appear more than coincidentally,” he concludes on page 123.  (Cain majored in math at Morehouse College.) More than coincidence? Really?

Sigmund Freud didn't believe much in coincidences, either, especially when it came to numbers.“‘Chance numbers’ that come to mind always reveal a reason when subjected to analysis,” he wrote in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  For instance, when a critic pointed out a small mistake in an article published by one of Freud's colleagues, the man dismissed the criticism by saying that readers could probably find "2,467 mistakes" if they looked hard enough. Freud wondered, why did his colleague say 2,467? After persistent questioning -- and some pretty convoluted mathematical calculations -- Freud concluded that  2,467 was related to the man's birthday and his older brother's, which revealed an unconscious and still unresolved sibling rivalry.

Not that Freud took much stock in numerology. The superstitious person "projects the motive to the outside, while I look for it myself," he wrote. "He explains the accident by an event which I trace to a thought." In Cain’s case, the good doctor wouldn’t need to look far to find the thought behind his obsession with 45. Cain himself zeroes in on the year of his birth (1945) as the source.

But what would Freud say about other apparently “chance numbers that come to mind” for Cain?  For instance, when confronted with stories from four women who claimed to have been sexually harassed by Cain and a fifth who alleged a 13-year affair with him, the candidate told CNN,  “You go through life and you believe that you have some people that are friends. And when someone that appears to be a friend turns around and concocts this story, you've got to question, the hundreds of thousands of people that I have met in my life? A hundred thousand people could possibly come out. It's probably an infinite number of people who could come forward with a story.”

A hundred thousand ? An infinite number? Applying Dr. Freud’s technique, let’s start with the magic number 45. 4 + 5 = 9. Nine, minus one gigantic ego, equals eight. If you knock 8 flat on its back you get   ∞ , the symbol for infinity. Hmmmm. Maybe that's it.

Seriously, though, another of Freud's observations offers a more likely explanation. Although Freud claimed that he wasn't superstitious, he did believe in omens. As he explains, ancient Romans would give up on a project before starting it if they tripped on the threshold on the way out the door. This behavior made perfect sense to Freud. The Romans' initial misstep was the physical manifestation of doubt; doubt sapped confidence and planted the seed of failure. By quitting before beginning under those circumstances, the Romans were "superior even to us unbelievers" and understood psychology better than even they knew. Or, at least, better than Herman Cain seems to have, when he decided to run for President.

Embracing the Almond

Every Christmas morning, my family eats oatmeal for breakfast -- not ordinary oatmeal, but "lucky" oatmeal. Buried inside the pot is a single almond. Working alone in the kitchen, I spoon the steamy cereal into bowls, one bowl for every member of the family, an equal heap in each. Then, everyone troops in, chooses a bowl, and sits down to eat. That's when the suspense begins. The person who finds the almond in his or her bowl will be blessed with luck all year, or so we say.

We've played find-the-almond every Christmas for as long as I can remember, ever since our kids were little. My wife and I shamelessly stole the ritual from a wonderfully whimsical children's book, Santa Claus and His Elves by Mauri Kunnas, now long out of print. (In the book, Santa and his elves fortify themselves with oatmeal with a hidden almond back at the North Pole after a long night of Christmas eve deliveries.) As young parents, we wanted to establish our own family traditions and add an extra dollop of magic to Christmas for our kids.  Since then, I've learned that the ritual seems to have Scandinavian roots. In some Norwegian or Swedish or Danish families, the almond-finder gets a marzipan pig or other special treat. And in others, everybody gets an almond in their bowls. This version sounds to me like Little League baseball, where even the losers get a trophy.

For the last couple of Christmas mornings, we've invited our good friends and neighbors, Tim and Denise and their two children, to share the almond tradition with us. We cook a huge pot of oatmeal, set the table with bananas, dried fruit, brown sugar, maple syrup, and other mix-ins, and all eight of us sit down to eat. Of course, our friends' attendance effectively doubles the odds that someone from my family will get the almond.  But that's OK. What decent friend wouldn't want to bestow a year's good luck on a guest?

And therein lies the problem: for the past two years, I -- the dismayed host -- have found the almond in my bowl.  The first time it happened, I apologized. When everyone good-naturedly busted my chops, saying maybe I'd snuck the almond into my own bowl, I tried to laugh it off. But when I spooned up the almond this year, I was downright embarrassed. "Look," I said, "after all the bad luck I've had this year, I'd prefer NOT to get the almond again. I don't want to go through another 12 months like 2011."

"Well, maybe you have to embrace the almond for it to work," said Denise. "Accept it. Don't feel sorry. Just look forward to better luck this year."

Good advice. So that's what I plan to do -- embrace my almond. After all, like all good traditions, the almond-in-the-oatmeal isn't about acquiring luck. It's about cherishing the luck we have. Eat enough bowls of oatmeal on enough Christmas mornings, and you'll eventually find the almond in yours. You'll eventually get your moment to feel special. Luck eventually comes to everyone, and repeating the ritual year after year reminds us of that. And, most important, the tradition brings loved ones together to share a breakfast on a special day, making the ordinary seem extraordinary. The real result is togetherness, and it comes from sharing the ritual, not in finding the random reward.

I've started this blog to explore exactly those kinds of questions: What peculiar things do we do to look for luck? What's the difference between superstition and ritual, and what roles do they play in our lives? What do they reveal about our character?

Join me in embracing the almond and thinking through those questions.