Also called moving house spell, new home blessing, spell to sell a house, housewarming ritual
A pair of rituals for leaving one home and entering the next: a thank-you sweep for the house you are selling, and a first-entry blessing with bread, salt, rice and a new broom for the new one. It draws on moving customs from Eastern Europe, China, Japan and Appalachia.
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Take care: Do not leave a candle burning in a half-unpacked house with boxes nearby. Sweep up scattered rice so no one slips.
Bread and salt are the classic welcome in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Balkan homes and are often the first things carried into a new house so it will never lack food. The Old Farmer's Almanac gives an American version: enter a new house first with a loaf of bread and a new broom.
Uses: bread, salt, new broom
Families choose a favourable moving date from the almanac, carry in a rice container nearly full with a red packet on top, and sometimes scatter rice, beans, salt and tea leaves through the rooms from the door inward and back. The first meal cooked on the new stove is part of the house's welcome.
In Edo-period Tokyo, people who moved gave buckwheat noodles to their new neighbours, a pun on soba meaning nearby. The custom has mostly faded, but small greeting gifts to neighbours are still expected.
Moving house sits on a fault line in most folk traditions: you are leaving a place your household has made its own and entering one that still belongs to someone else's memories. Slavic households answered with bread and salt, the oldest welcome in Eastern Europe. Chinese families consult the almanac for a lucky date and bring rice so the house begins full. In Edo-period Tokyo, new arrivals handed buckwheat noodles to the neighbours.
The broom rules are among the most widespread. Appalachian and wider American folklore says not to carry an old broom into a new house, and the Old Farmer's Almanac repeats the advice to enter with bread and a new broom. Selling a house has its own Catholic custom of burying a statue of St Joseph, covered in its own entry. This page focuses on leaving and arriving well.
A loaf and a little salt carried into a new home or offered at its door, so the household will never go hungry and life there will keep its savour.
The first visitor to cross the threshold after midnight on New Year sets the household's luck for the year, so they arrive with gifts of coal, bread, salt and drink.
A used iron horseshoe nailed above a doorway to bring luck into the house and keep the Devil, witches and fairies out.
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