New Years Day 2026

Sheila and I are enjoying a quiet start to the new year.  Last night our New Year's Eve celebration consisted of eating a high class carryout oriental meal and watching TV.  Sheila had a decadent pork belly banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) and I had a truly wonderful Pad Thai.  We were both asleep long before the New Year arrived.  And I am thankful for that.  I slept six  hours straight which for me is a blessing.

Today, the house is filled with smells that bring back old memories, black eyed peas and mustard greens simmering in a "pot likker" flavored with smoked meat.   Soon, Sheila will add the smell of her famous iron skillet corn bread to the mix.  The smells would be familiar to any southern born child black or white.  Soul Food and Southern home cooking are if not the same thing at least close first cousins.  

Today's meal is highly symbolic for Sheila and I.  The current zeitgeist be damned, we are southerners and we will not forget our southern heritage.  Our great grandfathers fought in the same unit during the civil war.  They did not wear blue.  We refuse to be ashamed of them or apologize for them much less try to erase their memory.  Southerner's now eat black eyed peas on New Year's Day for "good luck" but the tradition has a much darker history.  

We eat the meal of black eyed peas and greens to remember the time that Northern troops on President Lincoln's direct order tried to starve Southern CIVILIANS into submission by stealing or burning all of the civilian food they could find, taking all of the livestock and leaving nothing but what they thought was inedible pig food ... black eyed peas.  Southerner's considered themselves lucky to have black eyed peas and thus the legend of black eyed peas bringing good luck was born.  Thus the southern legend of eating black eyed peas for good luck on New Years Day was born out of hunger, hate, cruelty and ignorance.  

Here in the Indian Territories the same tactic was applied. The North planned a second "March to the Sea" through Oklahoma and Texas but Indian troops allied with Texas Cavalry cut them to ribbons every time they marched.  The Northerners then tried to literally starve the Southern sympathizing tribes into submission by withholding food distributions, burning crops and stealing livestock just as they did in the deep south.  Tribal legend has it that starving Cherokee women followed the cavalry columns leaving Ft. Gibson to pick the undigested grains of corn from the horse's droppings to feed their children.  It's hard to imagine American troops feeding their mounts grain while Native Americans starved outside the walls of the post.  But, given the state of the human heart, especially in wartime, I don't doubt the legend.

Every year, in remembrance, Sheila and I cook a pot of a rich old Southern dish called "Hoppin John."  It contains black eyed peas, greens, onions, fatback and ham.  We usually cut back on the fatback, adding just enough to give texture to the broth and use smoked turkey legs instead of the ham.  It is always served over rice with corn pone of some sort on the side.  In the past, we would eat on the pot of "Hoppin John" for days and send bowls of it home with whoever happened to stop by.  This year it was a much smaller pot for just the two of us.

New Years Day is a good day to remember who we are, where we came from and what happened in the past.  We need to remember these things because the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, capable of unimaginable cruelty all the while proclaiming the righteousness of the cause.