Turkey Day Got Weird? Make It Witchy Instead

Let's reframe Thanksgiving! A single card can change the tone of a week, and the Moon does exactly that. We unpack its call to intuition, shadow, and instinct, then weave those insights into a holiday many of us find complicated. Rather than sidestep the discomfort around Thanksgiving’s history, we name it and choose a grounded path forward: honoring the land and labor behind our food, practicing mindful eating, and building traditions that feel true.

I share how tracking the Moon’s movement through the zodiac reshaped my energy and rituals, plus simple ways to reconnect with lunar rhythms even when life is noisy. Think water rituals, salt baths, and a few minutes under the night sky to listen for what your body already knows. From there we explore rewilding: shaking off learned behavior, finding your voice again, and anchoring that change with story, symbol, and nature.

If you’re craving slower gifting, you’ll find a toolkit of handmade ideas: dried citrus garlands, bird-friendly pine cones, tea blends, herbal oils, and moon-kissed bath salts. Not everyone is stitch-worthy; spend your energy where it will be cherished.

We close with journal prompts to rewire attention toward beauty and choice. What are you grateful for? Which traditions no longer fit? What is your intuition asking you to grow during the waxing moon? Press play to gather calm, craft meaning, and set the tone for a kinder season. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review—what tradition are you choosing to release this year?

Take 20% off Our Coven Annual and Semi-annual memberships with the code SAMHAIN https://our-coven.mn.co/landing

Chapters

• 0:00 Pulling The Moon Card
• 1:56 Intuition, Cycles, And Moon Tracking
• 5:56 Rewilding The Self
• 10:31 Water Rituals And Weekly Focus
• 12:06 Community Sale And Resources
• 12:52 Rethinking Thanksgiving
• 19:01 Gratitude Practices That Feel Real

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:12

Hey witches, welcome back to another Cozy Coven Chat. I am your host, Jenny C Bell, and this is for the week of November 23rd. First, we're gonna start with our card. We have the moon, which is one of my favorite cards. Um, like I've said, I'm using the modern witches tarot. And so this is a picture of a big moon in the sky and two naked women, one with a wolf mask and one with a dog mask, and then there's like a shadowy woman in the water. And so this card, because we there's often a wolf and a dog, it represents like our two sides of ourself, like our wild self and our domesticated self. And I like this one too because we have this shadow element of in the water too. So we have like all these parts of ourselves represented. And the moon represents our intuition, and so does the ocean. And I like that it's two women because with our menstrual cycle, we are very much controlled and by the moon and you know the ocean, like it controls that kind of blood flow, water flow. So um in our coven this for November, one of the uh I always do a pick a card reading, and one of them, one of the piles was very like moon related, like it was very much about getting in tune with the moon and tuning yourself to the moon. So the moon is coming in strong. It's interesting because we don't have a new or full moon um this week, but she's always there, and we don't talk about it as much, but there's you know things to be done with the waxing and the waning moon. Like there's always moon work that could be done. So part of tuning in with the moon is noticing how you feel for a whole year. I get the Wii Moon's um planner, and it tells you like what sign the moon is in. So that moon changes signs like every two and a half days or so. And so for almost a whole year, I really let myself tune into that. Like, what it how do I feel when the moon's in Taurus versus Sagittarius, etc. And I really kind of read up on it, and really that was a way for helping helping me understand my relationship with the moon. I'm a cancer rising, so the moon really affects me deeply. And I don't know, that's one way to kind of tune in. I have a moon planner/slash calendar in my Etsy shop that has like different journaling prompts to help you like tune in with the moon. There's different ways to do it. We have some moon things in our coven as well, but yeah, there's just so many ways. And I think if you are interested in really awakening and reconnecting with your divine feminine self, regardless of gender, the moon is the way to do that. Like it's so deeply feminine, but also for everybody, you know, like a real feminist is for everybody's rights. It's not someone who just is for women's rights. The original like definition when I was in college was a feminist was for equal rights, including for animals, right? Like in nature, like wants everybody to have be healthy and whole. And so that's working with the moon is really allows you to step into that intuition and that wild self. I always like this card because the wolf is the wild part of us, the rewilding. I remember one year I picked as like my key card for the year. I used a Kyle Gray deck, um, I think it's Angels and Ancestors, and in there he has like this she-wolf card where it's this woman's face wearing like a wolf skin. And I knew exactly what that meant. Like I should be listening to Shakira. Number one, number two is that I needed to re-wild, that I needed to shake off a lot of societal pressures and norms and learned behaviors and like find my voice again, find my intuitive self again. And what was so interesting is like you can't make this up. So I pulled that card in like December, and then the following November, December, so it's like at the end of that year, I went to my local thrift store and I found like that card as a little wall hanging. It was someone obviously had made it. It was like a sculpted woman's face with a wolf um skin with feathers, and I brought her home and I cleaned her and I painted her and like touched her up and I hung her on the wall, and I was like, this is mission completed. Like I felt that was the sign that you did it, like you re-wild yourself, like you're listening to yourself. And the same with the book Women Who Run with the Wolves. You know, it's that book is about that. It's about like relearning your mythology, relearning your place in the world, your instincts, all of it, you know, and being outside is part of that, tuning in with the moon is part of that. So much of modern living has kind of robbed us of our natural inclinations, right? Because of artificial lighting and this, and that we're not as in tune with the moon. But the moon is there, and she's still pulling and ebbing and flowing. So yeah, I think this is a week to work with the moon and to maybe do some salt baths, right? That whenever the moon card comes up, it's like always think of the water. Visit water if you can. Um, love that. I want to share that I'm still running my sale for the Arkhoven community. Um, we have 20% off of annual and semi-annual memberships with the code SOWIN, which is S-A-M-H-A-I-N. And you can find more at jennycbel.com. I want to talk a little bit about Thanksgiving. So I live in the United States. I know if you're in Canada, Thanksgiving already happened for you. And I brought up recently in our coven, I was like, you know, how do you feel about Thanksgiving and how can we make it more witchy? And pretty much the collective answer was that nobody really loves the commercial origin of it. You know, I think as like once you are old enough to realize that Thanksgiving isn't what you thought it was as a child, right? That colonization is real and it wasn't like what happened to Native Americans, indigenous people in the United States was horrendous. And you start to it becomes like tainted, you know. It doesn't, it feels icky. Like I still am young enough to have made like basically a paper warp on it at school, and we all put them on in elementary school, like cringy, but you know, like that's there's it's just a lot, and so people were talking about that. They were talking about how they're not really like proud of their country right now, and yeah, so it comes with a lot of like heaviness. So if you are celebrating Thanksgiving, I wanted to give some ideas of how to kind of reframe the narrative because you know, for me, um, it's usually just my small family of four, and my children love love it because they love to eat and they love to celebrate. Like, you know, I I make I make dinner almost every night, like a few times a month we go out to eat or something, but I don't go to the extent of making so many sides, you know, like I do for Thanksgiving. So it's special to them. I also don't cook, quote, American food very often. Like I don't, like we eat a lot of Mexican, Asian, and Italian. Like that's my main menu all the time. Lots of pasta, lots of tacos, lots of pinto beans, lots of stir-fry and tofu. And so when we I make all this American food, it feels unusual for my family. And so it's exciting for them and it's comforting. During COVID, my son asked to have Thanksgiving in the summer, and we did. Um, so let's talk about like reframing it. So, as witches, we are in the season of Sawin, moving into the season of winter solstice, right? We're in this in-between time, we're getting closer to winter, we're already kind of had our last harvest, which you know, really Thanksgiving for a lot of people becomes like a harvest celebration, but the harvest is kind of done. Like a lot of people already experienced their first freeze at this time. So let's think of different ways we can celebrate it. First, as a harvest celebration, going and collecting leaves. I like leaves, I like cinnamon sticks, kind of making it like this celebration of what you do have, what you are grateful for, um, what the earth has provided for you for this year, um, celebrating family, celebrating friends, if you're friends giving. Like it's about harvesting the good. It's a focus on the good. Another one is to focus on gratitude, you know, giving thanks that Mother Earth is providing you with this food, that you have the money to buy the food. I like to do like the tick not han way of mind-fleeting. It's like, look at the apple. I'm grateful to have bought the apple from the person at the grocery store. I think about the people at the grocery store, I think about the truck driver that brought them there, I think about the person that picked the apple. I think about the farmer that planted the seeds and watered it. I think about the farm. I think about the sun and the rain. You know, you can really get into this in-depth kind of way. I actually have a YouTube video about mindful eating. And that's, you know, a way to make it not about politics, not about our history and our country that is, I don't have a word for it, not good, um, ugly at times. It makes it more about being just grateful for the food. So we can make it about gratitude, we can make it about harvest, we can make it about Yule. As some people in our coven were like, I'm thinking about doing things like to start decorating for Yule that day. So, like I love to dry orange slices, you can string popcorn, you could um make it about giving back to nature. The love, it's so old school. And even if you don't have kids, you should do it. Where you take pine cones and you tie ribbons on them and you cover them in peanut butter and bird seed and you hang them in trees, like, do it. It'll make you happy. Um, it makes the birds happy. It's you know, that kind of thing. Personally, what we do as a family is um we're we don't eat meat, we eat some of us eat seafood, but I make my own Saitan, uh, not Satan, Saitan, um, which is like similar to a tofer key, but I make my own. I usually make cranberry sauce and a gravy. I make mashed potatoes, um, macaroni and cheese, and then it kind of changes. This year I am making a kombucha squash uh blended, like I would sweet potatoes instead of sweet potatoes, because I got two in my farm box and I have a lot of it frozen in the freezer. So I'll be making that. And then we usually have like a nice meal, we talk about what we're grateful for as a family, and then we go and be out in nature. And that's something I started actually with my mom and my sister. It was just the three of us. We would eat uh like an early lunch, and then we go take a hike somewhere. We would go to somewhere called Mormon Rocks in Southern California and just kind of be out there. And then by the time you're done hiking, you get home, you're ready for dessert, and then kind of we usually like watch the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special and call it an evening. So, and then the next day we always decorate for Christmas and Yule, and for here in my town is a tree lighting ceremony and this little parade, which is so cute. I live in a Hallmark town, let me tell you. It's gorgeous, really exciting when they do that. And so I if you are celebrating Thanksgiving this year, see if you can reframe it for yourself to be about being grateful for what you do have. I know there's a lot of people without. There always are a lot of people without, but more so now. And so being grateful for having what you have and being grateful for your abundance, that brings in more abundance, brings in more joy. Um, yeah, so it's kind of how where I'm at with Thanksgiving personally. Um, I would of course I'm gonna celebrate it because my kids want it, you know. Like when you have children, it's you it puts you in a position where like, yeah, it's like it's it's better to celebrate all the things with them, I think. Um and I always kind of think of it as for me, it's kind of the last day to do like sowen type things. I started start to move into Yule at that point. So on that note, when I took my crochet class, I really loved that the teacher talked about how not everyone is worthy of your crafts. She said, Not everyone is stitch-worthy. And so, and in fact, someone in the group shared how she crocheted this blanket for her daughter, and her daughter didn't like it, and it was actually a really sad story. But then that's when the teacher was like, Yeah, not everybody is worthy of it. And she also said that there's a difference between homemade and handmade. So she said, homemade feels and looks homemade, and there's nothing wrong with it. But handmade is like something you could sell a shop, right? And so this time of year, if you're going to be making presents for other people, this is kind of the time to begin that journey. And something I had started originally with my friend group in New Jersey was Yule was for handmade presents. So we could spend no more than$5 and we would exchange handmade presents. And I still to this day have a pentacle my friend made me. It's just this little um circle of wood that was cut, and the bark makes the outside circle. And she meticulously glued in twigs and made a star, and it's still the one I use on my altar. How long now? I think I got it when I was 16. It's almost 30 years old. So that's a fun tradition. If you have witchy family members or other people in your life that are witches, having a handmade Yule exchange is really fun. Also, doing something where like you do a craft together is super fun. Um, some favorites are, like I said, drying oranges, but I dry them sit I dry my citrus uh in circles and in half circles because then you can put them together as like a moon phase. Try to envision that. I have a TikTok on that, but yeah, so that's really nice. And you can dry all kinds of citrus just low and slow in the oven, like as low as your oven goes, and just keep checking them, flipping them like a couple hours, and they continue to dry when they're out. So that's something that's super easy to put together. You can stream them together and give those away. Um, this is a time to make cordials and tinctures. I made my husband a beard oil last year. I used Rosemary Gladstar's recipe. Um, your library might have a lot of good books on tinctures and things like that, but this would be the time if you haven't already started them to start these herbal projects since they sometimes they take up to six weeks. So you want to, you know, start putting things into oils or into alcohols or whatever, however, you're gonna do that. Um, making tea blends was really popular in our coven last year. Several people did that. Uh, just you know, buying the herbs if you have a bulk store and kind of you know putting them together into little cute like muslin bags. It's a really cute idea. Simple, go it's good for teachers, especially just make sure you tell them what's in there. Making um giving people things like crystals and card decks and things like that. If they're not on the witchy path, may not be like for them. Um, but everybody likes like bath salts and body oils, and you know, you might you might have charged it under the full moon. They don't need to know that. They'll just be like, this is the best bath oil I've ever used. Um, so yeah, making using like your witchy skills that you have for little gifts like that's a great idea. If you have family members that open to it, give them like a little coupons for card readings. It's a nice way to get you practice, and it's a nice free gift. You know, you're giving up your time, but you don't have to spend any money. So, yeah, this is a time, I think, to kind of start thinking if you're going to be making Yule and Winter Solstice gifts. Start looking ahead at that. Let's think about our journal questions. So we have the moon, we have Thanksgiving. I really encourage you, if you've never kept a gratitude journal, to do so. I've been doing it since the beginning of October. I just think of 10 things every day that I'm grateful for. And sometimes I write it down, sometimes I just lay in bed with my fingers spread, and I bring my fingers down as I think of each one of the things. It's a great way to end the day. It starts to rewire my brain to look for things throughout the day to write down. Be like, oh, that leaf was so pretty. That's going in my gratitude journal. Like it just starts to help me look for positive instead of problems, right? So I am of course gonna ask you, what are you grateful for? I want to know as well. I want you to think about, um, I would like you to just think about in general how you feel about Thanksgiving. Like if you're in the United States, like what are your personal feelings and thoughts on it, and why? I would love you to know, like, what are some holiday things you like and don't like. You know, as we get older, there may be traditions that you're hanging on to that you don't actually enjoy. And radical idea, you don't have to do them all the time. So let's say, like, you know, your family always made these cookies and you've just been making these cookies, but you actually don't like them at all. Stop making them. So this is a good time to start thinking about your holiday uh traditions and schedule and let go of some things that you don't love, you know, and decide to start something new. Like, you know, you don't have to do the same old things if you don't like them. Um, your joy is important. You matter, and your joy is important. And then lastly, because we have the moon, what is your intuition trying to tell you? What's popping up right now? Right? We're in this kind of waxing moon energy. We get the moon card. Makes me think that there's some intuition popping up for us. So, what do you think? I hope that you are able to find some gratitude. I hope you're able to enjoy this week. If you have time off, I'm grateful for that for you. If your children are off and you're all together or you're going to see family, may it go smoothly. May everyone get along, and may you enjoy your holiday season. Bless it be.