In my lifetime, eating black-eyed peas at each year’s beginning has been an inviolable Southern tradition. Grandmothers and mothers would no more think of not serving them on New Year’s Day than they would of not praying before meals.
Even when I was overseas in the military, Mama sent packages of black-eyed peas, and admonished me not only to eat them, but also to share them with soldiers from the South … and if any were left over, with some of the Northern chaps, too. (Mama was a tolerant person, but even so, she’d often slip and refer to those who started the War Of Northern Aggression as “damn Yankees,” and besides, she was offended by the fact that some Northern farmers use black-eyed peas as cattle fodder.)