✨ Wheel of the Year but Make It Vibe:

Celebrating the Sabbats Without the Colonial Hangover

By Burnt Sage and Blunt Truths

Let’s be real: the Wheel of the Year? It slaps. The rhythm. The seasonal awareness. The excuse to dress up, light a bonfire, and eat bread in the woods with people who probably own at least one cauldron. Beautiful stuff.

But here’s the rub: many modern interpretations of the Sabbats are filtered through a distinctly colonial, Eurocentric, and often cis-hetero patriarchal lens. And that’s a big ol’ nope. For witches, pagans, and spiritual rebels trying to practice responsibly in the 21st century, it’s time to reframe, reclaim, and vibe check our holidays.

So let’s walk the Wheel together—without the guilt, gatekeeping, or Great White Folk Festival energy. Sabbats for the people. Sabbats for the planet. Sabbats for the now.

🌱 Imbolc – Not Just Brigid and Brooms

Imbolc is often sold as a quiet honoring of Brigid and the return of the light. And listen, we love Brigid—but not everyone walks an Irish path, and not everyone has to.

Decolonized Vibe:
Make it about the spark. The creative ignition. The first stretch after hibernation. Light a candle for the ancestors, for the revolution, for the ideas not yet born. Honor your personal hearth—whether that’s your kitchen, your craft table, or your group chat of fellow witches scheming new futures.

Imbolc isn’t a Hallmark holiday for witches. It’s not about polite candle lighting and pastel altars. This is where the real work begins.

This is the season when your soul starts to itch.

After months of spiritual dormancy, emotional molasses, and let’s be honest—seasonal depression and collective burnout—Imbolc shows up like the quiet click of a lighter in the dark. Just a flicker. Just a spark. But it’s enough.

This is not about being ready. It’s about remembering that readiness is a lie. Imbolc says, "Stretch anyway." Crack your back, rub your eyes, and make one small movement toward your own becoming.

🕯️ Light a Candle—for More Than Just Hope

So go ahead and light that candle—but make it intentional. Not just for the vague idea of “new beginnings,” but for:

The ancestors who fought for your survival and your voice.
The revolution that still needs your magic, your words, your fire.
The idea that’s been simmering quietly, waiting for you to stop doomscrolling and write it down.
The part of you that nearly gave up last winter.

This isn’t performative. It’s practical. It’s power. A single candle on your stove can be an altar. A single match can be a manifesto.

🪵 Your Hearth is Where You Build it

Let go of the idea that you need a stone fireplace or some Pinterest-perfect altar space to honor the spark. Your hearth is wherever you tend the fire.

It’s your kitchen, where you whisper spells into soups and bless the bread rising under a dish towel.
It’s your craft table, littered with half-finished sigils and a chaotic mess of glitter, glue, and hope.
It’s your group chat of tired witches and loudmouth mystics, dropping memes and mutual aid links at midnight, planning futures that haven’t yet arrived.

Imbolc is the gathering of coals. It’s the choosing of kindling. It’s every time you choose intention over inertia, ritual over routine.

🥣 Nourish the Spark

Feed it with warm food, with music that makes you move, with words that stir something deep. Feed it by showing up for one small act of magic, justice, or joy.

This is the time to journal your weirdest ideas, to sketch out a spell that scares you, to send a voice memo to your coven that just says: “I’m waking up again. Let’s start something.”

🌱 The Vibe of Becoming

Imbolc isn’t spring. Not yet. But it’s the promise. It’s the rumor of spring. And it asks only one thing of you:

Show up for the becoming.

Not the productivity. Not the full bloom. Not the seven-step healing plan you bought on Etsy.

Just the becoming.

That first stretch. That first spark.

That whisper of “I’m still here—and I’m not done yet.”

🌸 Ostara – Bunnies, Fertility, and Some Awkward Pagan-Christian Mashups

Let’s not pretend this one isn’t a little messy. Spring equinox? Great. Egg magic? Yes. But colonial “fertility rites” that ignore queer bodies, neurodivergent families, and non-reproductive joy? Nah.

Decolonized Vibe:
Ostara is about balance and potential. Celebrate whatever is sprouting in your life—relationships, resistance, healing, herbs, or your latest hyperfixation. Dye some eggs, yes, but also plant a seed for something that doesn’t need to be useful to capitalism to be worthy.

Let’s be blunt: Ostara is messy.

It’s the Spring Equinox, yes—equal light and dark, that beautiful balance point that makes witches do a little shimmy in their gardens and stir their tea with extra intention. But it’s also one of those sabbats that got steamrolled by both history and Hallmark. You know the one: pastel eggs, fertility overload, people in flower crowns reenacting 19th-century faux pagan rites like they’re starring in a Renaissance Faire reboot no one asked for.

And listen, we’re not here to yuck anyone’s yolk. If flower crowns are your jam, rock ‘em. But let’s be honest about the underlying narrative: Ostara has often been packaged through a cis-het, colonial fertility lens that centers reproduction as the gold standard of life-affirming joy.

And that’s where we say: Nah, fam. There’s more.

🥚 Eggs Are Not the Only Symbol of Life

Egg magic is powerful. It’s ancient, it’s cross-cultural, and it’s symbolic AF. But let’s not pretend that if you’re not fertile or not interested in reproducing—or you’re queer, trans, child-free, neurodivergent, or simply not aligned with that vibe—that you’re not part of the life force party.

Fertility isn’t just uteruses and sperm. It’s:

The birth of ideas.
The sprouting of courage.
The first real laugh after months of silence.
The creative explosion that comes when you finally feel safe again.

So let your eggs represent whatever the hell you need them to. Cracked open trauma? New art? The baby goat you want to adopt? A deeper connection with your own non-linear healing?

Ostara is about possibility—not about reproducing a colonial fantasy of who gets to carry it.

🌈 Queer the Equinox

Ostara doesn’t need to be a hetero-hierarchical sacred orgy (unless that’s what you’re into, in which case consensual joy away!). It can be a celebration of transformation, of gender fluidity, of queerness as the ultimate springtime rebellion against a system that told us we had to fit into one narrow kind of bloom.

Celebrate:

Chosen family that got you through the winter.
Queer love in all its forms—messy, healing, divine.
Your evolving self, even if you don’t know where you’re headed yet.

Paint your eggs with pride flags. Plant seeds for new relationships. Let your altar be an offering to the parts of yourself you weren’t allowed to love until now.

🧠 And Let’s Talk About Neurodivergent Springtime

Ostara is overstimulating if you’re not ready. All that blooming and buzzing and pressure to come out of your cozy emotional cave? Yeah, no thanks.

If your version of spring is a soft awakening that takes 45 minutes and three tries to leave the blanket nest, that counts. If you celebrate by reorganizing your sticker collection and talking to your houseplants about your trauma, that’s legit seasonal magic.

Neurodivergent witches don’t have to follow the high-energy sabbat script. Your cycle is sacred too.

🌼 Decolonize the Damn Holiday

Let’s be real: a lot of “Ostara” celebrations are patched-together attempts to recreate a pan-European, vaguely pagan origin story that never existed in the way we’re told. And too often, it erases Indigenous seasonal traditions tied to the actual land we live on now.

If you’re on stolen land, part of the equinox magic is acknowledging that land’s real rhythms—not the imported ones. Learn the native plants that bloom first. Leave offerings that honor the ancestors of the land, not just your own.

We don’t need to recreate European faux-folklore. We need to root into the land beneath us and the people we share it with. That’s real magic. That’s Ostara without the colonial hangover.

🪄 The Vibe: Rebirth Without Rules

So what does Ostara really ask of us?

To honor balance.
To tend the first green shoots.
To imagine what kind of world we want to grow—without demanding that it look like anyone else’s version of “spring.”

Make your Ostara altar weird. Make it queer. Make it slow, or sexy, or silent. Plant seeds of resistance, joy, absurdity, healing. Paint your eggs with glitter and rage and soft hope.

It’s not about fertility. It’s about becoming.

And that? That’s worth celebrating every damn year.

🔥 Beltane – It’s Not Just Maypoles and Hetero Frolicking

The Beltane narrative loves to emphasize fertility and the sacred masculine/feminine blah blah blah. But that’s just one thread of a much deeper, wilder tapestry.

Decolonized Vibe:
This is the season of desire, sure—but not just sexual. It's about claiming your joy, stoking your creative fire, dancing your rage and your love into the earth. This Beltane, bless your kink, your craft, your gender journey, your fire circle, your chosen family.

Beltane is where the fires really start to roar, and it’s about damn time we throw out the watered-down version that smells like every Renaissance Faire booth selling fairy wings and “Sacred Divine Union” necklaces. Let’s drag this sabbat out of the binary woods and into the glorious, inclusive wild where it belongs.

We’re keeping the fire, the lust, the chaos—but ditching the tired-ass script. Because Beltane isn’t just about fertility. It’s about aliveness. All of it. Every messy, magical, embodied spark of it.

🔥 Beltane: Light the Fire, Burn the Binary

It’s Not Just Maypoles and Hetero Frolicking

Let’s just say it: Beltane gets reduced. Flattened. Oversimplified into the pagan version of a gender reveal party—with extra flower crowns.

You’ve seen the script:

Sacred Masculine and Divine Feminine “consummate” the land.
The Earth becomes fertile through the act of hetero sex magic.
Everyone dances the Maypole like it’s not a giant phallic symbol.

And while yes, those roots do exist in the historical Beltane narrative, they’re just one thread in a much deeper, wilder, more expansive tapestry. The truth is, this sabbat deserves a bigger stage than the binary allows.

🌿 Beltane is About Aliveness—Not Just Fertility

Let’s blow the dust off this idea: fertility doesn’t just mean making babies. It means creation. Spark. Vitality. The sheer thrill of knowing you exist in a body that pulses, breathes, and wants things.

What are you birthing right now?

A new relationship with your body?
A boundary you were once too scared to draw?
A piece of art that won’t leave you alone?
A new gender expression that feels like wildfire in your veins?

That’s Beltane, baby. The heat that says “Yes, more.”

🏳️‍🌈 Queer the Fire

This isn’t “man plants seed in woman, world is healed.” This is “we are the fire, and we decide how it burns.”

Beltane is deeply queer. Think about it:

It celebrates joy without shame.
It honors pleasure as sacred.
It encourages bodies—all bodies—to move, touch, feel, and express without apology.

So let your Beltane ritual look like:

A drag show in the forest with glitter as your offering.
A solo dance party in your living room in nothing but moonlight and eyeliner.
An orgy of radical self-acceptance.
A potluck with your coven-turned-queer-family, laughing until the candles burn out.

Because the Sacred Union? That’s you, united with your truth, your desire, your becoming.

🔥 Burn What Binds You

Historically, Beltane bonfires were about protection—driving cattle between them, burning away illness, lighting every home hearth from the same communal flame.

You know what that sounds like to me?

Revolution.

This is the sabbat of burning what no longer serves:

Systems that told you your body was sinful.
Binaries that tried to cut your soul in half.
Trauma that wrapped itself around your joy like barbed wire.

Light your fire and name what you’re releasing. Burn it. Dance it out. Scream into the stars if you need to. The fire hears you.

🌸 Sex Magic for the Rest of Us

If you want to have sacred sex under the moon with someone you love (or several someones), go forth and frolic! But let’s also recognize that sex magic is not limited to the able-bodied, the partnered, or the binary.

Sex magic can be:

Touching your own skin with reverence.
Saying “no” without guilt.
Writing poetry that gets you off emotionally, intellectually, soulfully.
Reclaiming your pleasure after trauma.

Beltane is about sovereignty over your own damn fire—whether you share it, guard it, stoke it, or dance around it all by yourself.

🪩 The Vibe: Wild, Witchy, and Absolutely Yours

You don’t need a maypole or a perfect ritual. You don’t need a partner. You don’t need to perform joy—you just need to invite it.

So:

Wear that outfit that makes you feel like a forest deity.
Eat ripe fruit with your fingers.
Bless your own body like a temple you’re finally moving into.
Laugh louder than you think you should.
Dance like the Earth is watching—and she approves.

Because Beltane belongs to the bold, the blooming, and the beautifully uncontained.

☀️ Litha – Not Your White Druid’s Solstice

Litha gets painted as this sparkly, sun-drenched festival where we all pretend to love summer. But many of us don’t thrive in that solar energy, especially when we’re disabled, neurodivergent, or burnt the hell out.

Decolonized Vibe:
Reclaim this day as a moment to pause, to witness, to check in with your body and boundaries. If your ritual is laying under a fan with watermelon and air conditioning, that counts. Honor the light, sure—but don’t forget to respect the shadow it casts.

Buckle up, because Litha is ready for its glow-up—and not the kind that involves flower crowns, fairy wings, or pretending we’re all golden children of the sun god. For a lot of witches, Litha is less “solar celebration” and more “seasonal sensory assault.”

It’s time we talk about the shadow under the sun and reclaim Litha for the rest of us—the tired, the tender, the neurospicy, the witches who sweat through their linen robes and quietly hate group drum circles in 90-degree heat.

☀️ Litha: Not Your White Druid’s Solstice

Reclaiming the Sun for the Burned Out, the Neurodivergent, and the Shadow Seekers

Let’s name it: Litha, the Summer Solstice, gets treated like the witchy version of a damn beach commercial. The longest day of the year! Radiance! Joy! Everyone’s frolicking through fields like pagan influencers in a sunscreen ad.

And if that’s your vibe, sincerely—go get it. Glow up, shine out, and dance naked in sunflower rings. But let’s be honest: for a lot of us?

Litha is exhausting.

😵‍💫 Some of Us Don't Thrive in the Light

Not every witch is solar-powered. For the disabled, the chronically ill, the neurodivergent, the introverted, the overworked, the pandemic-weary, or the just-plain-sick-of-pretending-everything-is-fine types?

Litha can feel like too much.

Too hot.
Too loud.
Too bright.
Too performative.
Too damn much pressure to celebrate joyfully.

Because the world tells us that summer is “happy” by default. But what if your joy looks different? What if your solstice isn't about beaming outward, but turning inward for protection, rest, and sacred defiance?

🔥 Burnout ≠ Failure

We need to start talking about how seasonal celebration doesn’t mean seasonal obligation. You don’t have to throw a bonfire party or host a ritual to be a “real” witch. You don’t have to make it aesthetic. You don’t have to perform your wellness.

Maybe your Litha looks like:

Laying on the floor under a fan whispering, “I’m still here.”
Watering your houseplants and calling that sacred.
Watching the sun rise and set in silence because the in-between is too loud.
Lighting a single candle and naming your survival a triumph.

If your fire is a flicker right now? That’s still fire.

🕯️ Rest is a Litha Rite

Here’s the truth no one wants to market in the witchy merch aisle: Litha is also the beginning of the descent.

The days start getting shorter after this. This is the peak. The apex. The tipping point. So yeah, it’s about honoring the light—but it’s also about knowing the dark is coming back.

That’s not something to fear. That’s something to revere.

Let Litha be your pause.
Let it be your permission slip to stop.
Let it be the moment you say:

“I don’t have to be on all the time.”

That’s solar wisdom too. Even the sun sets.

🦋 The Neurodivergent Solstice

If the traditional Litha celebrations feel like a chaotic mess of sunstroke, sticky social expectations, and sensory overload?

You’re not broken. The tradition is just rigid.

Try this instead:

Stimming with sun tea. Put herbs in a jar, set it in the sun, and watch magic happen slowly.
Solstice playlists made of soft ambient sounds or nostalgic jams that ground you.
Shadow journaling about what’s been illuminated in your life this year—and what needs releasing.
Art magic that reflects your inner fire: doodles, digital design, collage, embroidery—whatever works with your brain.

Litha doesn’t have to be performative radiance. It can be internal integration.

🌞 Reclaim the Sun Without Worshipping It

You don’t have to “love summer” to honor the Solstice. You can respect the sun as a force of nature—one that gives, but also scorches. One that warms, but also blinds.

Maybe Litha is about building a healthier relationship with visibility. With how much you give, how brightly you shine, how far you stretch yourself to be what the world expects.

Maybe the most radical Litha ritual is to stop overextending yourself.

That’s sacred too.

✨ The Vibe: Sacred Pause. Inner Flame. Unapologetic Rest.

Let everyone else spin their sun wheels. Let them leap bonfires, dance until dawn, and Instagram their golden-hour altar cloths.

You? You tend your fire the way only you can. You slow down. You breathe. You say:

“My joy doesn’t need to be loud to be valid.”

Because you are solar-powered on your own damn terms.

🌾 Lammas / Lughnasadh – Bread, Harvest, and Cultural Appropriation Warnings

There’s deep richness here—especially if you actually descend from cultures that celebrated grain harvests. But slapping Celtic names on rituals without cultural context or lineage? Yikes.

Decolonized Vibe:
Make bread as ritual, absolutely—but know why. This is about gratitude and labor. About whose hands plant and harvest and bake. About mutual aid and food justice. Bring offerings to your altar and your local community fridge.

let’s slice into Lammas/Lughnasadh like it’s a warm, ancestral loaf of bread—and not the weird, crusty performance piece some folks have been passing around in the name of “Celtic authenticity.” Because this sabbat? It’s deep, it’s sacred, and when done wrong, it reeks of crunchy appropriation and half-baked rituals pulled straight from Pinterest.

So let’s decolonize the grain, bless the labor, and talk about how to celebrate the harvest without stealing someone else’s sickle.

🌾 Lammas / Lughnasadh: Honor the Harvest, Not the Hashtag

Bread, Bounty, and a Little Thing Called Cultural Respect

Lammas (Anglo-Saxon for “loaf mass”) and Lughnasadh (Irish, pronounced LOO-nah-sah) mark the first harvest of the Wheel of the Year. It’s a time of gratitude, grain, and gut-checks: What have you grown? What are you reaping? Who planted the seeds with you? And more importantly—whose stories are you telling when you celebrate?

Because here’s the thing: the harvest doesn’t belong to one culture. Every people, everywhere, have honored the rhythm of reaping. But when you slap the name Lughnasadh on your Instagram loaf and call it “witchy,” while knowing nothing about Lugh, Irish sovereignty goddesses, or Gaelic ritual practices, you’re not celebrating—you’re reenacting.

And witches, we can do better.

🍞 It’s More Than Just Bread

Yes, baking bread is a powerful ritual. It’s tactile, ancestral, sacred AF. But it’s not just about carbs and kitchen witchery. Lammas/Lughnasadh is a community harvest celebration. A festival of the first fruits, of giving thanks for what has come through collective labor.

So before you light a candle and Instagram your sourdough starter, ask:

Who helped you grow this year?
What structures sustained you?
Who’s still working in the fields while you feast?

The harvest is communal. So is justice.

⚠️ The Celtic-Aesthetic Problem

Look, honoring ancient Celtic traditions is beautiful—if you’re rooted in them. If you’re Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, or Manx and have done the work to know your stories? Raise that sickle and offer your grain to Lugh and the land.

But if you’re casually cherry-picking names from a Llewellyn book and calling it ancient tradition because it “feels witchy,” we need to pause. Because Lughnasadh isn’t yours to cosplay.

And Ma’am, you know the vibes I’m talking about:

Folks using Lughnasadh and Lammas interchangeably without understanding that one is an ancient Gaelic festival of games, offerings, and sovereignty rites… and the other was a Christian overlay meant to neutralize the “pagan problem.”
People invoking Lugh because he’s hot and sounds like a Leo moon in human form, but couldn’t tell you who his foster mother was or why her death is central to the celebration.

Yikes.

You don’t need to cosplay a culture to celebrate the season. You need to root yourself in what’s real.

🧑‍🌾 Celebrate the Labor, Not Just the Loaf

This is the sabbat of sweat equity.

Of hands blistered from planting.
Of grief held in calluses.
Of ancestors who harvested under colonizers’ whips and contracts.
Of modern workers who grow our food and still go hungry.

So what if Lammas/Lughnasadh became a ritual of acknowledgment?

Buy from local farmers.
Cook a meal and share it with someone who needs it.
Start a food sovereignty conversation in your magical circle.
Leave bread on your altar—but leave groceries on a neighbor’s porch.

Because harvest magic doesn’t end at your altar. It starts there. And then it feeds people.

🥖 Make It Personal. Make It Real.

Not connected to Celtic heritage? That’s okay.

Make your own ritual language. Name your harvest after your ancestors, your land, your story. Call it something else entirely if “Lammas” doesn’t resonate—but keep the spirit of it.

Bake bread with your grandmother’s recipe and call it your family's offering.
Bless the food bank donation box as your altar.
Offer gratitude to the field workers, not just the field spirits.
Celebrate what you have grown, nurtured, carried, and survived this year.

Because the real sabbat? It’s the work you’ve done. It’s the seeds you’ve kept alive. It’s the way you keep showing up for your community, even while tired, even while wounded.

🌾 The Vibe: Bread and Balance, Not Borrowing

So here’s your Lammas/Lughnasadh invitation:

Stop performing harvest. Start honoring it.

Celebrate without stealing. Feast with context. Bless the land you're actually on—not the one in some fantasy Druid cosplay version of Scotland that exists only in your favorite book series, or in my favorite series Outlander....you know what I mean.

Because there’s nothing wrong with ritual bread and sunflowers.

Just make sure the story you’re telling is one that resonates with YOU and your magic.

🍂 Mabon – The Colonial Thanksgiving Knockoff (But Make It Respectful)

Honestly, Mabon often turns into diet Thanksgiving, complete with awkward cornucopias and land acknowledgments that feel more like checkbox rituals than true reverence.

Decolonized Vibe:
If you’re on stolen land (spoiler: most of us are), Mabon is the time to deepen your relationship with Indigenous history and present-day resistance. Feed people. Share your abundance. Learn your bioregion’s real harvest cycles—not just the ones printed on Llewellyn calendars.

Let’s go hard on Mabon. Because this one? This one needs to be cracked wide open like a fake plastic gourd from the dollar store and examined for the colonial cringe it really is.

We’re not holding back. We’re bringing truth to the harvest table, and we’re flipping it if we have to. So pour yourself a strong apple cider, light that cinnamon stick on fire, and let’s unmask the myth of Mabon.

When Gratitude Gets Performative and the Cornucopia Starts to Reek of Pilgrim Vibes

Let’s start with the obvious: Mabon isn’t ancient. It’s not some sacred, time-honored name passed down through generations of wise witches and village elders. It was slapped onto the Autumn Equinox in the 1970s by Aidan Kelly, who wanted all eight sabbats to sound equally Celtic. The name "Mabon" was lifted from Welsh mythology and glued on with no historical context.

So yeah—it’s the pumpkin spice of the sabbat world: basic, modern, and questionably appropriated.

And honestly? Mabon celebrations often feel like a community theater reenactment of Thanksgiving… but with more candles, less genocide acknowledgment, and the same weird tension about who brought the gluten-free stuffing.

🦃 Mabon or Mayflower?

Let’s talk about how this sabbat became Pagan Thanksgiving Lite™:

Tables laid out with decorative gourds no one knows what to do with.
A frenzy of “give thanks” posts on social media with hand-holding-circle energy.
The inevitable “Let’s do a land acknowledgment” moment that sounds like someone Googled the closest tribe 10 minutes before circle started.

It’s well-meaning. It’s earnest. But when it stops at aesthetics and performative gratitude, it becomes spiritually hollow.

True harvest magic? It’s messy. It’s relational. It’s reparational. And it doesn’t get tied up with a seasonal bow.

⚠️ The Land Acknowledgment Problem

Look, honoring the land you stand on matters. But let’s be real—acknowledgment without action is just a prettier form of colonial guilt.

You want to do it right?

Learn about the Indigenous peoples whose land you occupy.
Support their current landback efforts.
Donate your damn money—not just your spiritual vibes.
Stop centering your sabbat around a narrative of harvest that erases the genocide that made most of our modern “Thanksgiving” traditions possible.

This isn’t about guilt—it’s about grounding. About honoring the land in a way that actually means something. Land spirits and ancestral spirits don’t want your cornucopia centerpiece—they want your accountability.

🌽 Gratitude ≠ Glossing Over

We love gratitude. Gratitude is powerful. Gratitude is grounding.

But gratitude that ignores harm is just spiritual bypassing with extra cinnamon.

So when you gather to give thanks at Mabon, ask yourself:

Who paid the price for your comfort?
What systems allowed this “abundance” to exist?
Who doesn’t get to harvest right now because the system wasn’t built for them?

Then let that uncomfortable truth become part of the ritual. Sit with it. Light a candle for it. Speak it aloud in your circle. And let that be part of your magic—not something you avoid in favor of Instagram-worthy aesthetics.

🧺 What’s Worth Harvesting?

Here’s the heart of it: Mabon is about balance. Equal day, equal night. A time to look back on what’s grown—and ask what still needs to be uprooted.

You don’t have to throw the whole holiday out. But you do need to get honest about what you're harvesting, and from where.

What labor went into your life’s bounty this year?
Who helped you get here?
What did you grow ethically?
And what do you need to compost—internally, communally, historically?

Because we’re not here to recreate Thanksgiving. We’re here to celebrate the truthful harvest—the kind that includes grief, gratitude, and the responsibility of privilege.

🔥 The Vibe: Burn the Cornucopia, Keep the Courage

You want to honor Mabon?

Make a meal that feeds more than just your household.
Name the harm. Speak the truth. Center justice in your gratitude.
Don’t just acknowledge the land—tend to it, give back to it, learn from it.
Invite your ancestors to the table—but don’t be afraid to call out the colonizers among them.

Mabon doesn’t need to be cozy. It can be catalytic.

It can be the moment you stop performing and start practicing.

🎃 Samhain – The Only One We All Agree Is a Banger

Even the most chaotic witches show up for Samhain. And yes, it’s powerful. But this isn’t just costume parties and ancestral Instagram aesthetics.

Decolonized Vibe:
Make space for grief. For accountability. For reflection on systems that keep some spirits unrested. Honor not just your lineage but the stolen, silenced, and dispossessed. This is your New Year—what are you shedding? Who are you standing for?

Samhain. The sabbat that even the "I haven't picked up a tarot deck in six months" witches crawl out of the crypt for. The one that turns every spiritual influencer into a part-time necromancer and every big-box store into a plastic cauldron explosion by September 1st.

And yes—Samhain is powerful.
But let’s go all the way in, because this sacred night deserves more than black lace and sepia-toned flatlays of skulls next to half-eaten pomegranates.

🖤 Samhain: Stop Playing Dress-Up with the Dead

This Isn’t Just a Costume Party with Candles—It’s the Spiritual Reckoning of the Year

Let’s not lie to ourselves: Samhain gets a lot of attention because it looks cool.

Skulls? Check.
Hooded cloaks? Obviously.
Shadowy altar selfies with the caption “Veil is thin AF”? Every year.
Ancestor “offerings” that double as witchy décor for your feed? Girl. Please.

But beneath the velvet and velvet ropes of witchy pop culture, Samhain is not cute. It’s not aesthetic. It’s not for show. It is raw, unfiltered, haunting truth. It is the mirror held to everything you thought you buried. It’s the reckoning.

And if you’re not ready to sit with that? Don’t call it a sabbat. Call it Halloween and keep it moving.

☠️ The Dead Are Not Your Backdrop

Let’s be very clear: Ancestor work is not cosplay.

Your grandmother, your great-uncle, the ones whose names you never learned but whose DNA dances in your blood? They’re not here to be background ambiance.

They show up at Samhain for:

Truth.
Reconciliation.
Witness.
Continuation.

So if you’re putting up an ancestral altar just because it “feels witchy,” but can’t be bothered to:

Speak their names with reverence,
Learn their stories (the whole stories, not just the shiny ones),
And offer more than a broken cracker and an LED tealight…

...then what you’re doing is not ancestor veneration.
It’s aesthetic necromancy, and it’s disrespectful as hell.

🕯️ Shadow Work Is Not a Buzzword

Let’s talk about the other Samhain trend: shadow work™.

It’s become the pumpkin spice latte of witchcraft—everybody talks about it, nobody actually finishes it.

Real shadow work?
It’s not a journal prompt with moody music.
It’s not a bath bomb and a vague mantra.
It is looking at yourself with zero illusion.
It’s asking, What have I buried? What have I denied? What am I afraid to become?
And then it’s sitting in that darkness until something true emerges.

Samhain is the moment to stop the spiritual small talk.
If you’re not willing to bleed a little—metaphorically, emotionally, ancestrally—don’t call it shadow work.
Call it seasonal introspection and carry on.

🕸️ The Veil Is Thin—But So Is the Bullshit Filter

At Samhain, the veil between worlds thins. Yes.
But so does the patience of the dead. The tolerance for spiritual laziness. The illusion that we have forever to become who we’re meant to be.

The veil doesn’t just make it easier to talk to spirits.
It also makes it harder to lie to yourself.

So this is the season of:

Burning the masks—not just wearing them.
Speaking to your grief, not just naming it.
Listening to the dead—not just lighting a candle and calling it good.

This is sacred time. And sacred time demands sacred truth.

🔥 Samhain for the Real Ones

You want a Samhain that means something? Here’s what that might look like:

Write letters to your dead—the beloveds and the complicated ones. Read them aloud.
Hold ritual space for grief. Not just yours. Collective grief. Historic grief. Unspoken, systemic grief.
Commit to a spiritual lineage—not a curated aesthetic. Do the research. Go deeper.
Burn what no longer serves, yes. But also ask: What have I refused to even name because I was afraid it would survive the fire?

Let your Samhain altar hold more than bones and incense. Let it hold truth. Let it hold work. Let it hold you, fully, fiercely, and unapologetically undone.

💀 The Vibe: Reverent. Reckless. Real.

You can still wear your cloak. Still drink your apple cider. Still dance under the moon with your coven in a graveyard if that’s your thing.

But remember: the dead are not your costume.
They are your teachers.
Your mirrors.
Your kin.
And this sabbat is their classroom.

Don’t show up for Samhain like it’s a photoshoot. Show up like it’s a homecoming.
Because that veil you keep talking about?
It doesn’t just lift for you.
It lifts for them.

❄️ Yule – The Long Night, the Sacred Pause, and Capitalism’s Worst Offense

You want cozy? You want candles? You want 3,000-year-old solstice traditions co-opted by every empire in history? Yule’s your girl.

Let’s wrap ourselves in a too-small thrifted sweater, light a candle that smells like “Pine Regret,” and absolutely go hard on Yule—the solstice sabbat that’s been mugged, whitewashed, and monetized by every empire with a marketing department since Rome.

Because yeah, it’s the Long Night. The Sacred Pause. But also? It’s Capitalism’s dirtiest sleight of hand, rebranded in evergreen and guilt.

So let’s roast this chestnut over an open fire—ritual, reverence, and rage all included.

❄️ Yule: The Long Night, the Sacred Pause, and Capitalism’s Worst Offense

Solstice Season Is Not Your Excuse to Overspend, Overperform, or Spiritually Burn Out

You want cozy?
You want candles?
You want a sabbat so old it predates Jesus, got steamrolled by the Church, and then rebranded by Coca-Cola?

Yule’s your girl.

She’s ancient, powerful, rooted in earth-deep rhythms of survival, grief, and stillness.
And she’s been dressed up in tinsel and dragged through every mall in the Western world until we barely recognize her.

Yule isn’t just the “witchy Christmas.”
It’s the blueprint for sacred rest.
And we’ve forgotten how to listen.

🎄 Yuletide or Yule-Tired?

Let’s be real: the modern "holiday season" is a machine.

Buy the gifts.
Bake the cookies.
Host the party.
Light the candles.
Post the perfect altar pic.
Schedule the virtual ritual.
Call your ancestors (but not Aunt Susan, obviously).

And somewhere in the middle of all that? You were supposed to find stillness.
To rest.
To descend into the dark with reverence.
To pause.

But instead, you're over-caffeinated, overstimulated, and over-budget.

Congratulations. You’ve been spiritually colonized by capitalism.

🕯️ The Sacred Pause: Yule’s Forgotten Core

Let’s go back to the real story.
The solstice is not about doing more. It’s about being less.

Less busy.
Less loud.
Less performative.
Less available to the systems that demand your burnout as proof of worth.

Yule is the darkest night of the year.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
It’s the hinge point where the world says, Stop. Breathe. Wait.
Where nothing grows.
Where the land sleeps.
Where our ancestors turned inward and did not pretend they were okay.

Yule is not a celebration of joy—it’s a reminder that darkness is sacred, too.

🎁 The Commodification of Joy (And How to Burn It Down)

Every empire in history has tried to wrap Yule in its own paper.

The Romans made it a party (Saturnalia).
The Church made it a cover story (Nativity, anyone?).
Coca-Cola made it a marketing campaign with a sugar high, endangered polar bears, and a smile.

And here we are now, trying to reclaim a sabbat that’s been wrung out and sold back to us with next-day shipping and targeted ads.

So ask yourself:

Who profits from your exhaustion this season?
What part of this celebration is yours—and what was fed to you?
What would Yule look like if you let yourself rest like the land does?

🧣 Your Permission Slip to Stop Performing

If your Yule looks like:

Saying “no” to one more gathering…
Not doing a 12-day ritual marathon…
Curling into a blanket and crying over the grief that hits hardest in winter…

That’s still Yule.

Your healing counts. Your stillness counts. Your non-participation in the capitalist holiday circus counts.

Light one candle.
Speak one name.
Eat one meal with intention.
And let that be enough.

Because it is.

🌲 Want a Real Yule Ritual?

Here you go. Free of charge. No shipping. No altar upgrades needed.

Step One: Turn off your phone.
Step Two: Turn off your lights.
Step Three: Sit in the dark. Let it be uncomfortable. Let it be holy.
Step Four: Light a single flame.
Step Five: Ask: What am I carrying that the darkness can hold for me?
Step Six: Let it hold it.

That’s it.
That’s the work.
That’s the magic.

Yule is not a Pinterest mood board.
It’s the fire you keep lit inside you when everything else goes quiet.

Decolonized Vibe:
Do less. Rest like it’s your birthright (because it is). Let the dark be dark. Reject the pressure to overspend, overpost, or overstimulate. Your ritual is presence. Your altar is the quiet. Your magic is in the slow return of light—within and without.

🔄 Reclaim the Rhythm. Rebuild the Meaning.

You don’t need to throw out the Wheel. You just need to turn it with intention.

You are allowed to remix. To adapt. To honor without appropriating. To celebrate without centering colonial narratives of "universal" fertility, agriculture, or gender.

The land you’re on has its own seasons. Your body has its own seasons. Your culture, your trauma, your dreams—they all move in cycles. That is your Wheel now.

So light your fires. Bake your bread. Raise your drum. But do it in a way that feels true. Not just to tradition, but to justice. To your bones. To your becoming.

Because this Wheel? It’s still turning. And we’re the ones driving.

📖 The Witches' Sabbats by Mike Nichols

Required Reading for Wheel-Walking Witches Who Want the Real Story

This is not your average “add-some-flowers-and-bake-a-cake” sabbat book. Mike Nichols does what most authors won’t: he peels back the modern neopagan packaging and digs into the actual historical and folkloric roots of each sabbat in the Wheel of the Year.

He explores:

Where the sabbats actually came from (hint: not always Celtic, and definitely not invented whole-cloth by Gerald Gardner),
How ancient seasonal festivals were shaped by agrarian life, not spiritual branding, and
The ways in which modern witches can celebrate with integrity, context, and deeper meaning.

What makes this book stand out:

It’s short but densely packed with real scholarship and a readable tone.
He doesn’t shy away from the murky bits—like how some sabbat names (hello, Mabon) are modern inventions, or how some traditions are cobbled together from multiple sources.
There’s a refreshing lack of fluff. No forced rituals. Just knowledge you can build your own practice from.

🔥 Who it’s for:

Witches who want to go deeper than Pinterest-level ritual planning.
Practitioners tired of being handed eight pre-fab holidays and told to “just vibe.”
Anyone interested in celebrating the sabbats without falling into cultural appropriation or historical inaccuracy.

📚 Bonus Witch Tip:

Pair The Witches’ Sabbats with your decolonized sabbat blog series—it makes a fantastic companion text. Use it as a grounding reference while you remix the Wheel with modern ethics, inclusivity, and radical witch realness.