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Growing up, my family had a tradition: every first morning of the month, before you said anything else to each other, you'd say "rabbit rabbit." It was always the first words of the first of the month, and always two rabbits. Like so many family traditions, I learned the rules and never questioned the origins nor the point of it. It's just "what you do."
Years went by, and then in school, a friend of mine and I were talking about family traditions one day, and she mentioned that her family said "rabbit" on the first day of the month. This was the first time I'd ever heard of anyone else doing it, but her family always said one rabbit, not two. We figured this was the same tradition, just that one of us was doing it wrong. We began a competitive game where every month, the first one of us to tell the other rabbit rabbit -- or in her case, rabbit -- would win bragging rights, as a way to insist our respective version was the correct one.
Over time, we added rules like "it doesn't matter when the person reads the message, it matters when you sent it," and "if you know what time zone the other person is in, you have to respect their timezone's midnight, not just your own." The latter gave me an advantage when I was living on the West Coast and she was on the East. I've woken up at odd hours of the night many times only to realize that it's the first of the month, at which point I've been compelled to take my phone out and send a text[1] that's just:
"🐇🐇"
It's been well over a decade of us going back and forth. We've done so despite moving away from each other and back, growing apart and then rekindling friendship. Throughout it all, we've stuck to this once-a-month tradition. I've stopped telling my family rabbit rabbit because ours was always an in-person sort of tradition. If I'm in the area during a month-change, I'll consider it, but it's much lower stakes and I'm long out of practice with them. But with my friend, because we've long-since transitioned to saying it over text message, there's never been a reason to stop.
Even without knowing the reason[2] for the tradition, I think it's a good thing to have a tradition that encourages you to reach out to your friend once a month. It's been nice to have the excuse when we've been distant, and it's been nice to pepper them into our existing conversations when we've been close. There have been sprees of months where I don't care as much or where I care far more deeply about making sure I win, but I don't think we've both missed any in that time.
This morning, I lost, despite being up through midnight for New Year's Eve. The loss was regrettable, but on the other hand, I got a chance to catch up after the holidays. It also got me to finally wonder: where did all of this come from?
According to the very specific wikipedia page about it, it's a good-luck superstition in English-speaking countries, and:
The origin of the superstition is unknown, though it was recorded in Notes and Queries as being said by children in 1909
Beyond that, the origins are mixed and varied.
I don't much care for the lucky superstitious aspects of it, as auspicious as it might be to win bragging rights against a friend for a whole month. I mostly just like it as a quick, benign, silly way to keep in touch.