Outside a Madrid lottery shop the queue bends around two corners; someone waited four hours just to buy the same set of numbers. Spain’s Christmas lottery is sold by shares, and bars, companies and villages club together on one number — most buyers know the odds are about one in a hundred thousand.
A 2500-dollar claim message was forwarded again in the family chat, and my mother’s first move was to hand me the phone. A $15 million settlement for a U.S. payment app starts paying out this month — the real risk isn’t missing out, it’s clicking the wrong link.
In the delivery bay a red flower is taped to the floor, the salesperson ties a red string to the mirror and hands over a tangerine. Car-collection customs differ everywhere: tangerines for “auspiciousness,” pineapple for “prosperity comes,” Korean plates that avoid 4, and the Turkish “blue eye” for a new car.
The day I got the keys, an elder stopped the mover about to lift the mattress: “How can you move the bed first? Bring the rice in first.” In the almanac, moving into a new home is ruzhai and moving house is yixi, and their favorable and unfavorable indications are not the same.
At a first-birthday feast a row of objects is laid out, and whatever the child grabs, everyone at the table has their own reading. Zhuazhou has records in China going back more than a thousand years; Korea calls it 돌잡이 and Japan calls it 選び取り. But it belongs to folklore, and looks at something different from the fortune systems.
Outside the exam hall, a parent carries rice cakes cut into squares and a packet of sweets—not to fill anyone’s stomach. Korean students eat malt candy to “stick” the answers; in Japan a five-sided pencil takes the homophone of “passing.” Behind these customs is really one and the same wish.
During the Double Ten holiday in the Taiwan region of China, many people are torn over just one thing: head south first or north first? What they dwell on more is the universal cash payout of NT$10,000—the region’s finance authority set out a plan on October 8, and if the general budget passes its third reading on schedule the first batch could be credited as early as January 26, 2027.
Halloween on October 31, Mexico’s Day of the Dead on November 1–2 and the Celtic Samhain all crowd into the same stretch of the year. All three are “dealing with the other world,” yet their aims are entirely different: one to drive off, one to play, one to reunite.
Korea calls the making of winter kimchi kimjang, usually done around the start of winter (ipdong), and many households pick one of two kinds of day: the “no-ghost day” and the “horse day.” The first refers to lunar dates ending in 9 or 10; the second takes the auspicious speed of the horse of the wu branch.
In 2026 the Chongyang Festival falls on October 18, the ninth day of the ninth lunar month. Nine is the greatest yang number, and two nines stacked give it the name “Chongyang.” The customs of climbing high, wearing zhuyu and drinking chrysanthemum wine have their own versions in China, Japan and Korea.
At New York Comic Con, Marvel Television announced “Zodiac,” a live-action series due in 2028, named after the twelve signs of the zodiac. The twelve signs began as the ancient Babylonians’ division of the sun’s path into twelve equal segments, and they are not the same thing as the astronomical constellations—astronomically, the sun actually passes through thirteen.
Between the night of October 8 and the early hours of October 9, the Draconid meteor shower reaches its peak, and these same days happen to fall in World Space Week. Wishing on a meteor is a small thing, but it follows a set of old rules: one meteor, one wish, and the wish must be short enough to state a “when.”
