Families are great.

But a lot.

If you’ve had about enough of yours, tell them this is a very important email you have to read.

I’ll back you up.

And it is important, as I present some crazy New Year traditions, that will make your party go with a bang!

Killer List of 10 Bread-Based New Year Traditions.

1. At a party, wait until the countdown to the new year starts before throwing a bread roll over your shoulder. You might hit the person you one day marry in the face with it.

2. Villages used to get through tough winters with the help of crafty bakers. The bakers lined the walls of bears’ dens with layers of puff pastry in autumn while the bears were foraging. Once the bear started hibernating, the bakers would heat the den until the pastry expanded and suffocated the bear. Hungry villagers could pay a penny to eat as much as they were able during the first week of January.

3. In Liechtenstein, they consider it ill-luck to start the new year with leftover bread. Liechtensteiners celebrate New Year’s Eve by dumping their old bread on the street, then racing their neighbours to sweep it into the nearest river or canal first.

4. Irish men who don’t want to die as virgins – but definitely want to die – will spend their New Year’s Eves tossing doughnuts onto the ring fingers of patient banshees. New Year’s Eve is the only day of the year that banshees feel like company.

Though not for long, as the mating habit of banshees resembles that of praying mantises.

5. In the Champagne region of France, people fire rockets inserted into balls of dough at midnight. The rocket simultaneously cooks the bread lightly and explodes it.

People from the Champagne region are called “Huskies”, not “Champagners”, and this is the “yellow snow” that Frank Zappa once warned about. Zappa preferred well-toasted, almost burnt, bread.

6. In ancient Rome, Caligula was gifted an enormous “life-size” chess set made of bread. At a loose end one New Year’s Eve, he ate the entire thing.

Feeling ill the next morning, he forbade the eating of “queens, bishops, or prawns [sic].” Even today, some people still won’t eat bishops in honour of Caligula’s tummy trouble.

7. Before hair dryers, fashionable ladies dried their hair in the oven in order to be ready on time for the New Year’s Ball at the castle. They protected their hair from the heat by wrapping it in pastry.

8. In England, grating buns on a hedgehog’s back on January 1st is considered lucky.

9. In Switzerland, people used to believe that cuckoos caused the passage of time. In 1431, the Council of Basel tried to stop time by eradicating cuckoos.

The clever cuckoos hid in other birds’ nests.

Not wishing to look foolish, Pope Martin V made his baker work all that week.

He baked thousands of pieces of cuckoo-shaped bread. These were “drowned” in Wildenstein Castle pond on the last day of the year.

10. In Japan, young women are increasingly opting for NYBBBs (“New Year Baked Bread Boyfriends”) instead of old-fashioned real ones. Over 90% claim real boyfriends “don’t like being buttered.” A claim that this author finds astonishing.

If that’s whetted your appetite for strange stories, you’ll find tasty bargains at the Smashwords end-of-year sale before 01st of January, 2026. Get 50% off many of my books here.

Chat soon,

Morgan

Get 2 free ebooks from Morgan here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.