12/30/2025
This is a powerful threshold we’re in — these scant days before the year turns. These are omen days, where the signs and animals we come across hold portents and messages for the year to come.
I heard a great horned owl hooting in the sycamores the other night, before the winds came. A tangle of twilight blue morning glories was blooming in my pear tree.
The moments that feel unexpected, and sacred. What are you noticing happening around you? What aspects of the divine are speaking through nature to you?
These days are full of magic, of rituals — for intention setting, reflection, and for making heartfelt wishes. I often begin the ritual of Rauhnächte (hairy or wild nights) at the Winter Solstice — the long night, the quiet turning, the soft rebirth of the sun.
Many use that still point as a doorway into the ritual of Rauhnächte — counting the Thirteen Magical Nights right up to January 1st, as the veil thins and the year ahead hums just beneath the surface, waiting to be shaped.
The Solstice felt too soon for me to begin this year (I kinda had a lot going on!), so I honored the old traditions of beginning the ritual on the night of the 25th — which is just as potent.
Remember, there are also 12 days of Christmas, and this magical time is not over until the 12th Night, on January 5th (or Epiphany)! Time bends differently in these in-between days, and it’s been helpful to remind myself that I’m not late. I’m right on time, baby!
The first twelve wishes we make with this ritual are offerings. Each night, you take one folded intention (folded toward you, always calling the energy in), and without peeking, burn it.
Let the smoke carry it upward, outward, elsewhere. These are the wishes you surrender to the unseen, trusting that the universe will carry them back to you in its own wild and mysterious timing.
But the thirteenth wish…
That one you don’t burn.
On the final night, you open it and read what remains. This is the wish that becomes yours to tend with your own hands, your own devotion, your own magic.
It’s a kind of pact with the year ahead — the thing that wants you as much as you want it. But you’ve got to be willing to step up and make it actually happen! This is where the real work begins.
I’ve been sitting with my own little stack of intentions since Christmas —listening to my heart’s wishes and what’s asking me to show up. I’m curious what will end up in my thirteenth-fold wish — the one I’ll be responsible for nurturing in the coming year.
If you’re joining in this ritual this year, I’d love to know how it’s been going, and what you might feel like you need some assistance with, wish-wise! If your heart’s wishes have begun whispering to you… Just remember that I’m here to help you make them all come true, should you need extra support.
I also like to burn old bits from the past year on New Year’s Eve (flowers, letters I didn’t send, things I’m ready to let go of), so I really love this wonderful poem from Naomi Shihab Nye / :
Burning the Old Year
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
ARTWORK: An illustration from The Storyteller by Florence Liley Young, 1915
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