New Year’s Traditions in the Delta
Courtesy of the Florida State Archives, Florida memory Project.
I am fascinated with the traditions that develop around New Year’s. In the Mississippi Delta on New Year’s Day families would eat a traditional dinner including black-eyed peas and rice and shoot out the old year and shoot in the New Year with their guns. “All over you could hear guns going off,” says one Delta native. Then on New Year’s Day folks would eat right at twelve noon insuring a favorable new year.
