New moon money ritual: turn the coins in your pocket, and 8 older ways people kept the purse full

Alexander Carmichael collected greetings said to the new moon in the Hebrides and printed them in Carmina Gadelica (1900), in Gaelic with his own English renderings. Men bared their heads, people bowed, and the first sight of the moon was met with words rather than ignored.

We are not reprinting Carmichael's English wording here, because the words that matter in your house are yours. A bow and a plain sentence of welcome do the same work the record describes. If you keep a book of the old customs you actually use, write your welcome down the first time and keep saying the same one.

Henderson (1879) records that seeing the new moon first through glass was counted unlucky, and that the side you saw it from mattered: over the right shoulder was the good way, over the left was not. Collections from other counties set the rules down differently, which is worth knowing before anyone tells you there is one correct method.

Nobody in those books explains why. They report what people kept. You can keep the rules because you like the shape they give the moment, or let them go. We do not rule on it either way.

The lucky piece turns up again and again in the nineteenth-century collections: a crooked or bent coin, a coin with a hole in it, kept apart from the money that gets spent. Henderson (1879) records the crooked sixpence among the lucky things of the northern counties.

Adapted for now, because no sixpence is going to pass through your hands: pick one ordinary coin, mark the date you set it aside in your book, and keep it in the purse, the tin or the drawer where you keep what matters. It stays. Everything else circulates.

People carried other small things in the pocket for similar reasons. Robert Chambers, in Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826, later edition 1870), writes of David Ritchie never going out without rowan in his, which is a custom with its own long record.

Handsel is the first money taken, or the first gift given, to open something new. Gregor (1881) records the care taken over it in the north-east of Scotland, where the first money of a sale was not treated like the rest. Robert Chambers describes Handsel Monday, the first Monday of the year, in The Book of Days (1864): the day for small gifts of money to children, servants and workers.

At home now: when money first comes in for the month, set a small part of it aside before the rest goes anywhere. Note what it was and the date. The custom is about marking the first of a thing, not the size of the sum.

Henderson (1879) and Chambers (1864) both record the New Year rule: nothing should be carried out of the house on New Year's morning until something has been brought in. First-footing goes with it, the first person across the threshold arriving with something in hand, usually coal, bread, salt or a coin, depending on the county.

The modern version is the same action. Carry something in before you carry anything out, on the first morning of the year. Bread and a coin are enough, and both are already in the house.

The four-leaved clover runs through the folklore collections of the 1800s as a lucky find, and the condition repeated in them is that it has to be come upon rather than searched for. We have not found an older book that dates the custom precisely, so we give it to you as folk custom of that era rather than as a line with a page number.

If you want it in your practice, keep the honesty in it. Do not go hunting. If you find one, press it, date it, and put it with the coin you keep back.

At Edenhall in Cumberland, the Musgrave family kept a glass beaker in a leather case. The glass is real and it is medieval, enamelled and gilded, made in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourteenth century, and it is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The story told about it said fairies at a well left it behind, and that if the glass broke or fell, the luck of the house went with it.

The tale was printed and reprinted through the 1800s, and Longfellow put Ludwig Uhland's ballad of it into English in 1845. Read it for what it shows: a household keeping one object whole, and treating its keeping as the household's own care. That is a different thing from a charm you buy.

The money bowl, coins and rice and cinnamon in a dish on a shelf, is modern. No old book we have read records it. That is not a reason to drop it. It is a reason to label it, so you always know what in your practice is old and what is yours.

If you keep one, give it the shape the record does have: the coin you turned at the new moon, the date written on a slip of paper, a pinch of what your own kitchen actually holds. Sealed jars do appear in the old sources, but they are a different working entirely, put under the floor against harm, and they were never about coins on a shelf.

Safety: keep loose coins out of reach of pets and small children. A swallowed coin is a veterinary emergency for a dog, not a wait and see, so call your vet the same day.