According to one funny tradition, if you say "Rabbit Rabbit" on the first day of the month before you say anything else, you'll have good luck. You can also say "Bunny Bunny." Evidently, the powers of good luck are not too picky.
As with most superstitions, we can only guess at how the Rabbit Rabbit habit took hold. It was common up to even the 1940s. British pilots of who repelled the Luftwaffe in World War II said it. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt claimed to invoke the rabbit. Even Gilda Radner, comedian on Saturday Night Live, claimed to say it.
The first written record of the practice comes from an English periodical published in 1909, according to the Farmers' Almanac.
