Reading your fortune from a fortune cookie is like suddenly being confronted with a new outrageous fashion; after seeing it you either giggle, snicker, roll your eyes or possibly poke your tongue out in disgust (or any combination thereof). At least that is the way that I had always reacted to these little mass produced fortunes until a strange sequence of fortune cookie events unraveled recently.

For Christmas I had given my wife a container of fortune cookies. Fairly odd gift right? Normally, I would agree with you. However one of the finer culinary experiences we had shared together was sampling chocolate covered fortune cookies at a favorite “place of interest” in the small town of Bandon, Oregon whenever we drove out there on a weekend: Cranberry Sweets. The topic of chocolate covered fortune cookies had come up a in passing couple of times leading up to Christmas, so I decided on getting some as a gift for her.

I could have ordered the chocolate covered fortune cookies from the source, however that was fairly impersonal. Instead I picked up a container of them from the local World Market and set about chocolate covering a bunch of them.

The gift went over well, except for one snag - after cracking open several of them, my wife had actually yet to encounter a single fortune. I was beginning to wonder if they were actually fortuneless cookies! Then a short while ago, she finally got one.

Which reads: “The star of riches will shine on you beginning next month”.

I must admit that I was relieved that I hadn’t given her a dud Christmas present. However, my relief changed to disbelief a couple of days later.

I was out to lunch with guys from work (past and present), at our usual Bad Chinese Buffet joint. The food was bad (as usual), but the company was enjoyable and fun (as usual). After the meal I thought very little of the fortune cookies that we were handed on a little tray with the bill. In fact I randomly handed out a cookie to everyone and dumped one in front of me for a while as we continued to chat. When I finally got around to opening mine, I was quite shocked to see:

Which reads: “The star of riches is shining on you this month”.

What are the odds of that, I thought, as I wondered if my wife still had her fortune somewhere. When I got home, I showed them both to her, and we were quite.. surprised.

And I guess the question this has been leading up to is; Are we rolling in the riches yet?

Well no, but I received my bonus that month and my wife received a significant pay raise the next. Both of which we were probably going to get whether we had eaten those fortune cookies or not. However, they tell fortunes, they don’t change them. Or they may just be little bits of paper that you can read into whatever you want. Either way, these fortunes we got from our cookies make us smile.