Happy New Year! This is a day filled with optimism and expectation about the future. Unless you are in Denmark and happen to be a plate. If that is the case, this is the day you have been dreading.

An old custom in Denmark is to usher in the new year by smashing dishes against the doors of your neighbors and friends. The bigger the pile of broken dishes at your door, the better the coming year will be.

Another Danish New Year’s custom is to leap off of chairs at the stroke of midnight. This is to symbolize the act of leaping into the new year.

It would be interesting to know whether there is a correlation between the number of broken dishes at the door and the number of broken bones for the household.