rabbits !!

[chas2008]

why did my dear old mum always insist the first word she said on the 1st of the month was RABBITS !! ?

[Schutzengel]

In Cheshire, the saying is "White Rabbits", but is is only supposed to be said on the 1st of October each year. It's considered to bring good luck, but only if it's the very first thing a person says when they wake up.

[Quizmonster]

The 'white rabbits' good luck chorus on the first of a month certainly sounds ancient, but the fact remains that it appears nowhere in English print before 1959! Yes, the reference was in the Opies' book about schoolchildrens' lore, but, if it was truly old, one would certainly expect there to have been some reference to it or use of it in earlier literature. The single word 'rabbits' did appear in the same context earlier but not before 1920 either.
There are some who believe it originated with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and others who claim it derives from a German custom of pagan times when pairs of white rabbits were apparently sacrificed at the opening of months for luck.
However, this is one of these things with an air of the historic about it which it does not truly deserve. The "tradition" of saying these particular words on the first of a month for luck is, at most perhaps, about a century old, despite the idea that sacred rabbits existed in much earlier times.

[jno]

well, my Mum certainly used it before 1959... presumably it was people like her the Opies got it from. She also said if you saw a black cat you should cross your fingers until you saw a white horse - from which you can deduce that she grew up in the country. I grew up in town and have never done amything of the sort (where does anyone see white horses these days?) and never pased this lore, old or new, on to jno jnr. If many people are like me, it'll eventually die out. But it looks as if the whiteness was seen as some sort of charm.

[Quizmonster]

As I said, J, this peculiar 'tradition' can be traced back at least to the 1920s.

[jno]

My mother used the white rabbits formulation, Quizmonster. It's intriguing to think it may have been invented by someone of her vintage. It seems such a bizarre thing to say that it's tempting to believe it really is much older even if nobody ever wrote it down, and that its origin is lost in the mists of time. Highfalutin Latinisms generally seemed to make it into print more often than country sayings, don't you think?

[Quizmonster]

Obviously, I don't know how old your mother is, J, and I certainly would not enquire into a lady's age! My own mother would be 103 now, if she were still with us and I certainly never heard the saying - in either form - from her or anyone else during my childhood.
Accordingly, it may well be - as you said earlier - that it came from your own mother's country upbringing with a closer relationship to animals than town-dwellers such as my family experienced.
Of course, one can never know how long any saying existed orally before someone wrote it down, but there is such a long tradition of writing for children that it seems odd that it did not do so until the late fifties.

[BillyBB]

Which area did your Mother grow up in? It may be a regional thing. We used to say it in the seventies and have ties with Norfolk, London, Manchester and the Midlands.