✧ *.🎄Yule Solitary Rituals🎄*✧
As the days grow darker to the shortest day of the year and the frost creeps on the skeletons of dead leaves and flurries seep into the streams of howling winds, we know we are reaching Winter Solstice. Though this is the darkest point of the year filled with frost and shadows, it is the time to fill the night with thousands of lights and celebrate unity, blessings and rebirth since the days will extend slowly as we enter the new year. To celebrate life and longevity in a moment of darkness we decorate the home with plants that keep its prosperous green and red colors. Pine, cedar, holy, mistletoe, rose hips, cinnamon, chestnuts, pine cones and winter fruits. (Interestingly enough plants like pine and rose hips are packed with vitamin C and can be used in healing teas!) This is also a time to gather together with loved ones and share what you have in a time of rest and stagnancy. Though it would be ideal to gather with a circle of intimate people this post shall focus on solitary practices of course!
A lot of us witches practice alone and have our own solitary rituals for each sabbat that we observe (or the ones we’ve created just for ourselves that we observe alone!) Like any solitary eclectic witch I do things my own different way but some of these things might line up with others practices. I do refer to some of the equinoxes/solstices/crossquarters by their celtic sabbat names but I celebrate them in a secular animist way and I treat the wheel of the year as a an argrarian cycle celebrating nature. I use sabbat names as a point of reference and also people that do celebrate these witches sabbats more traditionally might find value in my personal practice! Here is my personal correspondences post and my personal Yule tag!
When I am alone and casting spells a lot of it is visualization/intent so my solitary rituals are more like activities I like to do then specifically casting a spell. If I am doing a spell with an activity based on it a lot would be listening to music to get in the mood and focusing on a candle while visualizing for a period of time! Eves are also important to my celebration as I like to stay up until midnight and cast a spell then!
Wednesday December 20th 2017
Make a Pot Pourri
ESPECIALLY if you have a cauldron, fill it up with all kinds of winter magic! Pot Pourris could make a great base for a spell! You can add all sorts of ingredients and maybe slip a paper with written wishes to be manifested inside. If you are very sneaky and a closeted witch it would be a great activity to do in the home! Add orange zest and rose petals for vitality and energy in winter! Put Rosemary and Rose hips for health. Add Pine or Cedar for prosperity! Put in mint and cloves for purity and keeping the space cleansed. Maybe don’t add all the pairings I’ve mentioned in this bullet point, yet consider that each ingredient has it’s own magical correspondence! There are great pot pourri recipes online. I like this article for some simple ideas!
Decorate your Altar
This is a great activity especially if you live in a house hold where you can’t express your spirituality throughout the home and have to confine it to your space. Decorate your altar with the plants of the season! It will smell incredible if you add cedar, pine or cinnamon and look beautiful with holy, rose hips, mistletoe and pine cones. Add peppermint for joy and luck and buy a little string of LED lights to wrap around it or make yule tea lights if you want something non electric. Burn peppermint, cedar, cinnamon or sandalwood incense and make your space jolly and merry!
Grow (borax) Crystals
Borax is super fun and non toxic and you can grow crystals overnight! What you will need is a box of borax, a pot you can use for crafts and some white pipe cleaners. You can make a pipe cleaner ‘skeleton’ for a tea light holder or make snowflake pipe cleaners for the borax solution. Here is a great tutorial on borax crystals. If you add food coloring you can change the color (it will nearly always come out as light pastel unless you add a lot but I like the white color for this sabbat anyway).
Make Sigil Snowflakes
Design spell snowflakes by drawing a thin sigil, then folding a paper up into triangles and drawing your sigil on the final triangle. You will have beautiful snowflake designs with amplified energy to hang in your windowsill! (I like this quick tutorial for ideas).
Bake!
Winter is the ultimate baking season and it makes the home smell great and you can indulge for the winter! Create delicious treats like ginger bread cookies, cinnamon rolls, red velvet cupcakes or even a mini yule log! You can also make poppets in the form of cookies or spell cookies in shapes of Yule trees (prosperity), ginger bread men or animals (if animals to maybe acquire some kind of quality that animal has to help you in your journey), or stars for joy!
Offerings to Nature
In this dark part of the year when you give back it can make an impact. Make pinecone bird feeders (of pine cones you’ve collected in nature please don’t use the craft store scented ones), Orange bird feeder, or treats for the fae. You can make beautiful sun catcher ice sculptures to decorate your balcony or garden with (1 , 2 ). Leave meringue mushrooms or holiday sweets for the spirits!
Spell Baubles
Make some spell baubles! Like the way there are spell jars, you can fill these baubles with certain desires and decorate your altar with them. Also as a tip, if you buy the large baubles, keep the ingredients dry so you can add an electric tea light inside and make them spell bauble lanterns! It will be a wonderful decoration in your space when the night is so long.
Smoke Bundles for Cleansing
Many of the seasonal fir plants can help cleanse the air! I’d suggest cedar, cinnamon, rosemary, sage and pine. Yew is toxic though I have absolutely NO IDEA who would even decorate their home with yew?? Why? But I could see the confusion occuring only if someone was harvesting pine in the wild and confused it with Yew. It’s good to be able to tell apart the difference between Yew and other pines and make sure to avoid it!
Make Scented Candles
I made this post years ago and I believe some links are broken (but also my instructions are sketchy cause this was when I was just learning how to make candles so don’t pay attention to my instructions anyway haha the ingredients are what matters), but you can be creative with scented candles! Winter solstice is a great time to make the home smell jolly and be creative plus you can add spells in it! Here are some of my favorite candles that you can find inspiration from! 1- spell pillar with things ontop 2- frosty pillars 3-Pillar with things around it (also my own when they are lit).
Make blessed crafts for friends!
If you have witchy friends or friends that respect your practice you can make them cute charms for gifts in the winter! This can be a combination of things above like a scented votive candle, a smoke bundle or a crystal tea light or:
Make a Magical Ugly Winter Witch Sweater:
We all need sweaters this time of year but also simple stitching, beading and embroidery is much easier than I thought and I ended up having an idea to embroider some cute tacky witch things on sweaters and make some enchanted sweaters! Michaels and other bead shops in the city sell crystal beads and you can sow stitch magic into it! I am making some for some witchy friends with flourite, amethyst and rose quartz beads as a gift for the winter solstice. If you have some sweaters you’d like to magic-afy but not ruin with kitschy-ness, you can still sew some crystal beads on the inside or in a place that it will not scratch you.
Fill the home with Music!
This is definitely the time of year we need cheer within the home! Some music I love for the winter solstice is the Nut Cracker. I also love ambient winter sound tracks like this one that’s very meditative or more mysterious like this one. There’s a lot of winter fairy music on youtube. Look up any Gothic Winter instrumental music and you will find a lot of tracks. There is also Katrina Skye who is super cheesy but she is so cheesy it’s charming. Her music tends to be very wiccan though.
Midnight Spell:
Winter Solstice is wonderful to do a spell focusing on reviving something for the new year. If there is something you want to bring to life again, an old hobby, an old connection, an old project or goal or dream, you can focus your spell on that!
An activity could be lighting a sparkler envisioning it to ignite the spirit of life and revive you. Pass it around your head, around your body and between each leg (like how you would cleanse yourself with sage or palo santo). Pass it over your magical items and crystals to charge (make sure it’s not near anything that’s very flammable though). Sparklers can give off a lot of smoke so I would not recommend this if you live in a smoke free environment.
Put to rest
As we descend into the slower restful part of the year it would be wise to use this time to focus on goals we want to accomplish for the next year and slow down or halt other issues we want to put to rest in order to focus on ourselves, whether it be bad habits, people that won’t allow us to grow, or locations we keep finding ourselves that are unhealthy. Write down these obstacles on a piece of paper or cardboard, put it in a container full of water and place it in the freezer in order to ‘freeze’ these things.
Thursday, December 21st 2017
Ice skating
Even if you are alone, ice skating on the first day of winter is pretty magical! Set up your favorite magical winter playlist on your ipod or invite a friend and glide away on the ice! The best is if it’s an outdoor rink!
Setting up lights
It is the shortest day of the year therefore being the darkest. To elevate your space, set up many colorful lights for a magical experience! If you have a space you can have open flame then:
Burn Scented Candles
Either the magical ones you’ve made on the eve or some that you’ve bought! Winter scented candles really add charm to the space!
Sing!
Song worship is a wonderful form of magic. You can sing spells or devote a song to your guides. Even if you don’t have a song to sing then intoning is a great way to elevate the space. Intoning would be wonderful to warm up your vocal chords and energy with then you could pick a devotional song or even a carol to sing!
Offerings
Your guides have been with you all year and the year (or sun) is going through it’s period of rebirth. You can set aside offerings in gratitude for them. If you want to make it in theme with the holidays you can set aside something like milk and cookies! If your guides like something specific then of course offer that to them.
Winter Grounding
Do some energy work on the first day of winter to center yourself and go within. Stand in the snow or on the cold hard ground and feel the cold electrify your senses as you ground with the earth. If cold is very much not your thing you can do energy work in your room with a sound bath using white noise tracks or meditative winter music. Put tumbled crystals like quartz, blue lace agate or angel aura quartz in the freezer until they’re cold and make a grid on your body by placing one on your third eye, throat, chest, navel etc and meditate. Focus on taking in as much energy to reserve for the season.
Make a Merry Potion!
As it’s the darkest time of the year the mood can plummet. A personal potion of mine is a wonderful potpourri-like tea that can help boost your mood. It has dried rose hips , hibiscus petals and anise and Rhodiola rosea or rhodiola tincture. I would suggest getting a rhodiola tincture (you can purchase from wholefoods or online) and putting it in there. I swear by this plant and tincture, rhodiola has been a great plant ally to me especially to help cope with depression (it helps increase serotonin) but since I don’t know all the medical specifics you should consult it with your doctor if you are on something like antidepressants. It’s a semi known thing so your doctor would probably have good advice whether its safe for you to take it or not. Otherwise I have literally been spreading this tincture at work and have been seeing changes with my coworkers and my own mental health like it has helped me survive this far so I will be using it to survive winter.
TREAT YOSELF
Winter is the season of resting. Make a potpourri-like hot bath with clementine slices, rose petals, epsom salt and anise stars. Be careful to not add something like cinnamon cause the oil can burn the nether regions. Also be careful with peppermint oil cause that can leave icy burns in the nether regions. If diluted properly the two could work but if you are not familiar with working with those oils I’d suggest leaving them out!
Celebratory Feast
If you are alone you can make yourself a delicious winter stew! It will be fun to slow cook something meaty or rich and make the whole home smell great and bring anticipation for dinner! If you are looking for more elaborate dishes I love to use seasonal ingredients for every sabbat. Pine is an excellent flavor that pairs well with fish like salmon. Chestnut is divine either sweet or savory. Roots like potatoes, turnips and ginger are a must!
Blessings
Since Yule to me is about generosity and unity I like to use the day to do helpful spells and send blessings to loved ones. Tip when you do a spell for someone: make sure it’s something they ask for and truly need. For example if you know your friend has been struggling to find a job or money you can do a money spell for them. If your friend has wished in front of you to be able to move out into a safer place, you can put energy out towards that. However a bad example would be if you think your friend is miserable cause they are single and you do a love spell. That can end up in a disaster! Only do a spell on something you know they need. Otherwise just send a blessing of good energy towards your loved ones!
