Interesting; that’s from the Bible. (James 4:7 – “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”) Must have been a cookie from one of those underground Chinese Christian churches!
I’ve done the “… in bed” reading for ages, but only when I’m with a group of people my own age. My former wife introduced me to the idea that two people should take an end of the cookie and pull, like a wishbone. The fortune is meant for the person who gets it in their half of the cookie.
3 and 4 carry the weight of law.
My favorite fortune was “There is strength in the will of the collective”.
I pictured a room full of people cutting up pages of the little red book and putting them in cookies.
- You have to eat the cookie before reading your fortune IN BED!
Haha my daughter taught me the whole “in bed” thing and I always thought she made that up herself!
Our tradition/rule is nobody hands them out. You have to choose your own from the plate. But then my littlest wanted to pass them out and got upset if we didn’t let her.
For years we said you had to eat the whole cookie, but then I quit the sugar so I couldn’t, so we said “someone” had to eat the cookie and fed it to the dogs.
Most of the time where we eat we don’t really get fortunes as much as odd sayings.
The day my friend graduated from college, we were celebrating with some Chinese food. As we ate, he talked about how he had been so focused on graduating that he really had no plans for after graduation. His life ahead, he said, was now a big, blank scary void.
He opened his fortune - it was completely blank.
I’ve never had any rules about eating fortune cookies, but I do collect the fortunes. I’m not exactly sure why I started this practice, maybe just to have something to do with the fortune, but I have about 30 of those little slips of paper now.
I think the one that amused me the most was “You are a happy man.” (I’m a woman.)
That’s fascinating! It never occurred to me it was a quote from the Bible.
Well, I haired of many different ways of how you do that whole fortune cookie thing yet this is the only 1one that comes to mind
~By thinking of someone1, then open and that is their Fortune Cookies.
This was the order and that of the fortunes that I got that night, from eating with the family
among the lucky, you are the chosen one 08 15 27 33 47 ,9
you have a kind and generous heart 06 14 29 33 39 ,10
people are naturally attracted to you 05 12 27 34 46, 25
https://sites.google.com/site/weyboom/f/Fortunes"]Fortune's - V For Value = Deepening of Team Human,Your Site-My online journal
This took place in 1984. I had had my first story published and was at a convention. A fellow writer invited me to a Chinese dinner with an up-and-coming agent. In the course of the dinner, the agent asked if I had a novel, and wanted to see it.
My fortune cookie was “Your new business venture will be successful.” A month later, the agent took me on.
Over the summer, we went out for Chinese again with my inlaws. My fortune cookie was “You will never have to worry about a steady job.” Oddly enough, this has been true: I’d lose jobs, but get new (and better) ones fairly rapidly.
We did the same thing in October. The fortune was “Soon you’ll be sitting on top of the world.”
On November 7, I sold my novel. On November 11, my daughter was born.
RealityChuck, see post #12. 
I once had a FC that said I would become a zombie. Never happened.
My own ritual is to wait for all other fortunes cookies to be taken, and I get the last one. That way, the fortune inside, whatever it may say, is destined for me.
Adding “in bed” at the end of a cookie fortune is old & busted. The new hotness is to add “with a gun”.
A whole group of people, in different US states, played the numbers in the fortune cookie and ended up winning the Powerball. It came to light, I believe because the Gaming authority suspected fraud due to the high number of winners, but the common thread was found to be the cookie.
<Homer Simpson Voice> And that’s the story of how I found out that it was a zombie thread.</HSV>
Among my friends, each person picks their fortune cookies, but gives it to someone else to read aloud. It’s more fun that way, I guess.
I used to collect my fortunes but stash got trashed while moving. The only fortune I seem to be able to recall said, “You will be the star of his life”. My friend was blushing as he read that loud.