Of all the luck! Today is a Friday the 13th—a day we believe will shower us with bad luck from sunrise to sunset. But that’s just us.
In Italy, Friday the 13th rolls over folks like a cool summer breeze, however, point out a Friday that lands on the 17th of the month, and they’ll react as if you’ve asked them to walked under a ladder or you’ve handed them a black cat! Most Hispanic or Greek countries will feel the same way if a Tuesday works out to be on the 13th day of a month. Gasp! NO, not a Tuesday the 13th!!!
Tuesday the 13th or Friday the 17th seem to be silly days to fear, but it is always easier to point a finger at others and to make light of their superstitions. Have you ever noticed that we assume that everyone around us holds Friday the 13th as being a day of great misfortune, but do you know of a single person who resists travelling on the 13th (as did Winston Churchill apparently) or who refuses to make financial decisions or fearfully forbids 13 people to sit down to dinner together? We claim that we ourselves aren’t superstitious but hold that everybody else is. How do we come up with this stuff?
In real life, most of us do not cast a furtive eye over the month ahead to check on whether there is a tricky Friday falling on the 13th, but just to give you a quick way to suss them out, any month that starts on a Sunday will hold a Friday the 13th.
Every year does not come equipped with the same number of Friday the 13ths (although every year has at least one) and, as luck would have it, this will be the ONLY Friday the 13th of 2025. Once we are able to move unscathed through today, we will be sailing on a wave of (presumably) terrific good luck until next year, when we will be given 3 of them to juggle before December. In fact, brace yourselves for the early part of 2026 because we will be brutalized by back-to-back Friday the 13ths in both February and March, followed by a misleading lull until November bares its F13 fangs.
The longest possible stretch of time without a Friday 13th is 14 months (such as from the July of one year to the September of the next) but you’ll have to check with the Almanac to figure out which years that will apply to.
The actual foundations of how Friday the 13th came to be associated with bad luck are about as solid as tapioca pudding and seem to have more to do with a general dislike of the number 13 and a misplaced suspicion of Fridays. Norse mythology threw shade on the number 13 by blaming Loki (god of mischief) for crashing a banquet of 12 gods (making it a party of 13). After inviting himself in, Loki tricked the blind god Hod (often associated with darkness and winter) into shooting his own brother with an arrow made of mistletoe, which killed him instantly. The story immediately gets much more complicated at this point, so we’ll just leave the episode wallowing in that tragic outcome. However, I can only imagine that Hod probably had a moment of marvelling at his incredible good luck to have hit anything at all, since one imagines he wasn’t much of an archer prior to this incident.
Christian mythology throughout the centuries, has also held the number 13 to be unlucky. There are people who somehow connect the number of those at the Last Supper (held on a Thursday), 13, to the groundless suggestion that Judas (the betrayer) was last through the door that night, thus providing the bad luck theory based on what happened the next day (which in my understanding had very little to do with luck in the first place). Other superstitious religious folks are convinced that Noah’s flood started on a Friday, that Adam and Eve shared The Apple on a Friday, and that it was on a Friday that Cain murdered his brother Abel (not that any of those dates are specified in my copy of The Bible!). So, Fridays and the number 13 on their own, ended up being viewed as dubious. Put ‘em together and you’ve just created a dirt storm in the minds of the superstitious.
In our day and age, the fear of a Friday the 13th is known as Paraskavedekatriaphobia. Catchy, right?
Since 1995, Finland has claimed Friday the 13th as National Accident Day. It’s not what it sounds like. They use the day to raise awareness surrounding automobile and workplace safety. No suggestion of whether it does the trick or not, but it’s a nice tie-in.
And then there’s Port Dover.
Port Dover, Ontario, is expecting 100,000 people to visit them today, Friday the 13th of June. Motorcycle enthusiasts gather in this charming small town that is perched on the north shore of Lake Erie (year-round population of just under 8,000 souls), every time a Friday falls on the 13th of the month.
This tradition was started in November of 1981 by a group of about 25 friends, all avid bikers, who agreed to ride to Port Dover and meet up at the local hotel for a round or two of giggle water on Friday the 13th. It seemed like a good excuse to get together and they vowed to do it every Friday the 13th.
Well, with each F13 the group grew to include more and more people, and now Port Dover closes down Main Street to vehicle traffic in order to handle the anticipated and welcomed crowds of motorcyclists (and wannabes) who roar into town for the festivities. The event is a full-day affair and now offers musical acts and vendors of all sorts. No word on whether there is a bouncy castle but from all reports, the F13 event seems to be good-natured fun for those looking for a destination ride on a Friday afternoon.
I think I will follow the lead of Port Dover and turn the superstition of today’s Friday the 13th on its ear by only allowing good luck to be squeezed out. In fact, I’ll begin with a trip to the bakery for a ‘baker’s dozen’ of their finest—13 for the price of 12 seems like a pretty lucky start to the day to me!
