Pearls of Wisdom - Happy Friday the 13th!

I'll be honest with you. I totally forgot about this month's blog. And I'm sort of in a holding pattern when it comes to Love, Capri Style. With no scheduled publication date yet, I can't release any official excerpts of the book, which is what I had planned to do for the next couple of blogs.

To make a long story even longer, I was casting around for ideas for this blog. Maybe it's a big historical day, I thought. So I checked out my calendar and that's when I realized it's Friday the 13th! My mom, who was as quirky and contrary as they come, always considered Friday the 13th her lucky day. God knows why, because the woman never seemed to have a minute of good luck in her entire life. She was definitely in the exception, since most people consider Friday the 13th a major bad luck day.

Why? Well, I've spent all day on the Internet exhaustively researching this burning topic and I'm here to tell you - no one knows for sure.

The most common theory is that it combines two things that were already considered unlucky in and of themselves. Turns out that since early Christian times, Friday has been considered a day of ill-omen, presumably because that's the day Christ died. And thirteen has long been an unlucky number. This too seems to come from early Christian traditions, particularly the belief that if thirteen people sit together at a table, one of them is going to wind up dead soon. That comes from the Last Supper, at which Jesus sat down with his twelve Apostles. Still, they had probably all sat down together for dinner on a few other occasions in all their years of traveling together. So just being thirteen at a table would not seem to be enough to lead to fatal bad luck.

As for Friday - It looks like many pre-Christian cultures held their Sabbath on Fridays. This is particularly true of any teutonic-influenced cultures that would have revered Freya, the Norse fertility goddess who gave her name to the day. This led to early Christian preachers referring to Friday as the Witches' Sabbath, which is probably the real origin of where its negative reputation.

Rossini, composer of The Barber of Seville (later immortalized by Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd), was always superstitious about Friday the 13th,. And then he went and died on that very day! There was a lot of publicity about the incident at the time, since he was enormously popular. I guess it would be like Andrew Lloyd Webber spending about fifty years walking around complaining about Friday the 13th and then dropping dead on that date. After Rossini's death, superstitions about Friday the 13th really seemed to get massively out of hand. So as near as I can tell, the whole thing is really just a media sensation that never died out.

Whatever it's origins, I hope you won't let all the media hype ruin the day for you. Happy Friday the 13th!

Lynn Reynolds is the author of "chick noir" suspense novel Thirty-Nine Again, which RT Book Reviews called "a first-class mystery and a first-class read." Her next book, Love, Capri Style, is a sun-drenched, fun-filled contemporary romance set on the island of Capri. It should be coming out any day now. . .