The Onion Calendar: A New Year Tradition

Culture | January 20th, 2022

By Sabrina Hornung

Photo by Sabrina Hornung

.The onion calendar is an old German folk tradition that predicts the levels of moisture each month throughout the year using salt, an onion, and a little bit of patience.

According to Ashley North Dakota residents Donna and Delbert (Del) Eszlinger, you take a nice round onion, cut it in half and peel apart the layers. Each layer is indicative of one of the 12 months. You then take a teaspoon of salt and put that in each of the cups between 11 pm and 12 am on New year's eve, then check it at 6 am on New Year’s Day. The amount of moisture in each cup is indicative of how much moisture you can anticipate for each month in the new year.

I decided to make my own onion calendar this year. My initial intent was to compare it to the Eszlingers’ but I was told the location affects the reading. I get it, you can’t predict the moisture levels in McIntosh County if you’re in Fargo.

I even kept one of my onions purchased from the local Hutterites for the occasion, though according to Del, it doesn’t matter where the onion comes from. I plan on noting monthly moisture levels in 2022 to see how accurate our calendar really is. That's the second most ambitious weather-related task I’ve mustered, the first being the onion calendar.

That being said, we had to ask longtime Fargo Meteorologist John Wheeler to weigh in his two cents on the onion calendar after getting the Eszlinger’s reading in 2021.

“I’m not big on folklore forecasting if there’s no physical connection. I can conceive of nothing in onion layers that would connect to weather by month, unless it’s magic and I’ve never seen evidence of magic.” Wheeler went on to say, “Long range weather prediction by science is not very good for many reasons. Scientific knowledge is often incomplete and I’m okay with that. I’ll always prefer the best available empirical evidence to blind faith.”

He suggested testing the onion calendar method using several onions. Even different kinds of onions to see if the onions yield different results.

According to my onion in Fargo, January was very wet, perhaps indicative of more snow. February wasn’t quite as wet but still had a fair amount of moisture. March was drier but the salt still indicated that there were trace amounts of moisture, as did May. June was bone dry and July and August had trace amounts of moisture. September was dry and October was running over with condensation. Does this mean torrential rains? A flood? A gnarly blizzard? November and December were also dry.

There are a number of folk traditions surrounding weather lore that were used in antiquity. For example, a ring around the moon can be indicative of snow or rainfall to come. There was one gentleman from Pingree who would butcher a hog and examine its entrails in an attempt to figure out the severity of the winter. Deer hunters have been known to invest some level of belief in this. The farmer’s almanac cited instances of folks examining the thickness of onion skins.

Placement of muskrat huts on area sloughs plays into folkloric winter weather prediction as well.

Meteorologists have a tough time predicting weather patterns, onions and entrails too. Only time will tell if the onion reads properly this year.