| Marisa LaScala |
Christmas has Santa Claus. St. Patrick’s Day has its leprechauns. Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve has fireworks, Champagne and resolutions — but it’s missing something key: a mascot to call its own. Sure, there’s Baby New Year and Father Time, but shouldn’t we demand better? Something a little more…porcine?
Enter the New Year lemon pig. With whole cloves for eyes, toothpicks for feet and a curly aluminum foil tail, lemon pigs straddle the line between hideous and cute. But if one is displayed on a table at a New Year’s Eve party, you better believe it’s going to start a conversation.
What is a lemon pig — and what does it have to do with New Year’s Eve?
The pigs re-entered the public consciousness a few years ago with a viral post from Twitter/X account 70s Dinner Party. It posted a picture from an old cookbook, sourced from the Grannie Pantries blog, with a caption that says, “For good luck in the New Year, a lemon piglet is must!”
Atlas Obscura researched the lemon-pig trend and discovered that, contrary to popular belief, lemon pigs aren’t traditionally linked to New Year’s Eve. The photo came from a book, 401 Party and Holiday Ideas from Alcoa, made to hype up Alcoa’s aluminum foil (hence the foil tail). Lemon pigs were included in other books and newspaper articles as a craft activity, but they weren’t holiday-related. “No other lemon pigs were lucky or had a New Year’s association,” the site notes. “The authors of 401 Party and Holiday Ideas likely added that element themselves.”
They’re not even particularly tied to the ’70s. In fact, Good Housekeeping included its own instructions for making lemon pigs in an issue dated September 1902. It was suggested not as a craft, but as a party accoutrement and a vessel for beverages. (Even better!) Luck didn’t come into play, but I’d consider anyone who got to drink out of a lemon pig pretty lucky.
The instructions, which ran in the second paragraph of the second column, read like this.
If you wish fun at a picnic or porch party, serve a “lemon” cocktail. With a sharp knife, cut the top lengthwise off a lemon for each guest. Scoop out the inside, and save for lemonade. Stick into the hollowed-out skins cloves for eyes and match-ends for the piggie’s four feet. Fill the lemons with a cocktail of strawberries, or any fruit in season (grape juice, iced, is always refreshing). Replace the lids with two holes in each to hold the straws which may be bought at any soda water fountain at five cents for two dozen. These lemon-pig surprises are especially amusing at a children’s party.
The Good Housekeeping story is evidence that lemon pigs have been associated with parties for more than 120 years. And while the Alcoa-style pigs weren’t always specifically for New Year’s Eve, pigs often play into plenty of New Year’s Eve traditions in their own right. That’s because pigs are often symbols of wealth and prosperity, so people invoke them to try and attract good fortune in the new year.
In Germany and Austria, for example, people buy little tokens that symbolize luck for the new year, and while there are many different charms on offer, pigs are often a favorite. (There, it’s also a tradition to eat either marzipan pigs or Glücksschweinchen, a filled pastry, that also comes in the shape of a piglet.) Upstate New York has a holiday tradition where people smash a peppermint shaped like a pig — you can buy gift sets that include a peppermint pig and a hammer — with the hope that dividing up the sweet also means sharing the coming year’s good fortune. And there are plenty of cultures where’s it’s considered lucky to eat pork on New Year’s Day, be it Southern hoppin’ John with coin-shaped black-eyed peas or Japanese toshikoshi soba, where pork broth is paired with long buckwheat noodles that symbolize longevity.
So even though the association between lemon pigs and New Year’s Eve is one manufactured by a foil company, I say we go with it. Plenty of folks on the internet have already taken up the cause, adding animals like lime pigs or lemon dolphins into the menagerie.
How to make a lemon pig
SOME PIG: Would Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web call this lemon pig “radiant?”
Making these New Year’s Eve versions is a little different than what’s described in the Good Housekeeping directions of yore:
- Start by grabbing a lemon (make sure the ends are sufficiently snouty).
- Cut a two V-shapes into the peel on the top and fold them back to make the ears.
- Cut a slit for the mouth.
- Poke whole cloves in for the eyes.
- Stick four toothpicks in the bottom for legs.
- Curl up some foil to use as the tail.
- Place a coin in the mouth slit as an extra wish for wealth.
I was able to make my own lemon pigs, and I am not a Good Housekeeping prop stylist or food editor, so I will add these tips for my fellow not-so-crafty crafters: The ears are the trickiest, since it’s easy to just pull them off entirely when you’re trying to peel them back. Make them bigger than you think they should be. After that, the foil can be difficult to poke into the back, so you might want to use a toothpick or knife to make a hole for the tail first. (Or maybe don’t us foil at all? We’re not bound by Alcoa’s rules! Atlas Obscura says famed chef Jacques Pépin liked to use a sprig of parsley instead.) And it also helps to use the toothpick to poke holes for the cloves, too.
I’m not sure what I will do with mine once they start to decompose, or if I will try and retrieve my sticky, lemon-juice-covered coins in the end. But for now, with my little piggies still fresh, they’re throwing the holiday scent of citrus and cloves into the air.
Marisa (she/her) has covered all things parenting, from the postpartum period through the empty nest, for Good Housekeeping since 2018; she previously wrote about parents and families at Parents and Working Mother. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn, where she can be found dominating the audio round at her local bar trivia night or tweeting about movies.