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.
The Pacific has been busy on several fronts these days: in the Northwest Pacific, what Japan is tracking is "Typhoon No. 25" (DUJUAN, Dujuan), while in the eastern Pacific there is hurricane "Polo". One side uses only a number, the other hands out a personal name — this article is about the naming of storms, and about why a name has never been a small matter in folklore.
The 2027 increase in US retirement benefits is still only an estimate (the official figure comes in October), Mexico's 6,400 pesos every two months is being credited in surname batches, Turkey's flat-rate top-up has no decision yet, and Japan clears the whole of 21 September for its elders. The search trends of the same period read like a comparison table of national pension ledgers.
From 19 to 23 September Japan runs into a five-day break, and the next named typhoon is already on its way; around the same period, weather systems in the Taiwan region, Korea, Spain, Brazil and Mexico all made the trending lists. As for the almanac's "suitable for travel" and "avoid travel", what exactly is it avoiding? It and a weather forecast are really two different systems of cause and effect.
