New Year: New Magic

The space between holidays feels thin, like the year is holding its breath. We step into that hush to make room for real change: honest journaling to name what hurts, sound and smoke to clear it out, and a house blessing that turns walls and windows into allies. Instead of forcing resolutions, we ask a better question from our oracle pull on the waxing moon: allow yourself to grow into what? With that answer, intentions stop being vague wishes and become touchable practices.

We explore why witches honor multiple fresh starts—Samhain, Lunar New Year, the Western calendar turn, and the astrological new year in spring—and how choosing your hinge point can steady your craft. If midnight finds you busy, the full moon in Cancer on January 3 offers a powerful reset for emotional release, journaling, and burning what you won’t carry forward. We share simple, grounded rituals: ringing bells through each room, tracing protections on doors and windows with black salt, refreshing talismans with oil, and setting the table with black-eyed peas and greens for luck and prosperity. Add folk charms like twelve grapes or a suitcase by the door, and you’ve woven old magic into a new morning.

Nature ties it all together. A New Year’s hike turned into a living omen: thousands of ladybugs shifting under winter leaves, a bright reminder to trust luck and keep moving. That story invites you to watch for your own signs and to craft traditions that fit your people, your place, and your pace. We round out with community news—our January theme is illuminate, plus a week-long photo challenge, live chats, and layered divination from tarot to charm casting—so you can grow with support and clarity.

Ready to make your own ritual and start the year with intention you can feel? Listen now, share this episode with a friend who loves fresh starts, and subscribe. If you’re called to gather with us, join the Coven in January with code CozyCoven for 50% off and tell us the tradition you’ll begin this year.

Code COZYCOVEN takes 50% off monthly membership: https://our-coven.mn.co/landing

Chapters

• 0:23 Welcome And Holiday Check-In
• 0:52 Listener-Only Coven Offer
• 2:22 January Theme And Community Plans
• 3:02 Oracle Pull: Allow Yourself To Grow
• 4:02 Full Moon Release On January Third
• 4:55 Many New Years, Many Fresh Starts
• 6:32 Year-End Reflection And Possibility
• 7:32 New Year’s Eve: Journal And Cleanse
• 9:35 New Year’s Day: Blessings And Traditions
• 11:30 A Hike, A Sign, And Trusting Luck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:12

Hello, witches. It's the after Christmas before New Year's Eve days, and I am your host of Cozy Comin' Chats, Jenny C Bell. This is for the week of December 28th. Happy almost New Year. Um calendar New Year. I talked about last time how there's so many options for New Year's as witches. But yeah, I hope you had a wonderful holiday. I hope you're planning something fun for New Year's. We're gonna talk about New Year's rituals in a moment. Um, but first I want to share that I have a special sale going on for podcast listeners for our Coven. If you've thought about joining us, but you're just unsure, this is your chance. Join us in January. Um, the code for you is CozyCoven, C-O-Z-Y-C-O-V-E-N, and it takes 50% off of the monthly membership. So it'd be$11. And so it'll be$11 to start new, try something new, join our Coven, and just see what it's all about and see if you want to stick around. So some things going on in January is our key, our theme for the month is illuminate. And we're gonna talk about all things illumination, what that means. We have a week-long challenge right after New Year's, a photo challenge, where we're gonna take photos of different things and talk about what they mean to us, kind of like photo journaling, if you've ever done something like that. And we have a live chat where we just share it. It's a really good way to get to know one another. I have a great card reading where we did charm casting. So picked a tarot, Lenarmand, um, different oracle cards, asked some questions, and then ended with charm casting for the new year. So super fun. Um, so yeah, if you've been thinking about joining us, join us. It's CozyCoven is the code, takes 50% off. You can learn more at jennycbell.com. I decided for the new year to pull not from my tarot that I've been using, but pull from my own Oracle deck. So if you don't know, I self-publish an Oracle deck with my friend Rosemary. She's my artist, and it's called the Cosmic Creator Oracle Deck. And for this week, we have Allow Yourself to Grow, which is the waxing moon. And so we are growing into what? That's what you need to determine. So as you look into the new year, as you get into that liminal space of midnight coming up on the New Year's Eve to New Year, where are you allowing yourself to grow? And that's why I love this deck. Each one has questions, and so allow yourself to grow. What are you growing into? What are you manifesting? All of the things, right? It's perfect for New Year's. I like to can't make this stuff up sometimes. On January 3rd, we have a full moon in Cancer, which is a really good day for emotional release and reset. So if you end up carrying any baggage from 2025 into 2026, you can let that go on the full moon on January 3rd. Journal and journal and journal, get it all out, burn it, throw it away, whatever. But that's the perfect day to let go of all of the previous heartache and baggage and worry, whatever. So you're not carrying it into the new year. Um, let's talk about some new year's rituals. So, like I said, um traditionally, witches say Sawin is the new year. Great, you can do that. Um, if you know you grew up in Asian culture and you celebrate lunar new year, that's probably a new year that you really love. If you grew up in using the Western calendar, this new year is your new year. The zodiac or astrological energetic new year is March. Like it's March 21st, the first day of spring. So we have lots of fresh starts. I like this time of year for the new year. I love a fresh, I don't know what it is. I don't really have like I must have a strong Virgo placement somewhere or something, but I love a fresh calendar. Like I look forward to my little planner. I like to open a fresh calendar. I don't know, it just feels so like there's so much possibility. Like you just like the full card, you're just standing on the edge of the unknown every year, and it's like, okay, like what can happen this year? I mean, when I look back at 2025, I knew my book was come gonna come out, but I didn't know I'd do things like be on the witches movie coven or start this podcast or um get a second book deal. Nothing. I you know what I mean, like so many cool things happened in 2025. So 2026, like we have all this possibility. I like to really contemplate and get excited about that possibility. So let's talk about some New Year's things. So, first of all, I like to treat New Year's Eve as a time to release, and that's why I'm saying if you don't get to do that because you're partying, that's totally fine. January 3rd, full moon, you can do it then. But I personally like to take New Year's Eve or the day before New Year's Eve and journal some stuff. Some basically some shit I don't want to take with me, right? Like, what is the stuff that's weighing me down? What's heavy? What feels ugly? What feels wrong? What feels like icky? What are things I want to, what are habits I want to break? No, not New Year's resolution type stuff. I'm talking like anxiety spirals, right? I'm talking that kind of thing. Not like I want to lose five pounds. I'm talking like I would like to stop worrying about this, right? So I can just get really real with myself, is what I'm saying. It's like the T the detox before I become beautiful, right? It's the bedraggled, sad little phoenix ready to burn before he be gets born again. Like I like to let the ugly out. I like to like investigate it and be curious about it and sit with it. That's what I like to do because then I can let it all go and feel like I'm going into New Year's as a new person. I also like to cleanse the space on New Year's Eve. So um, that's the ringing of the bells. That's like a way people get rid of sp evil spirits or negative spirits. So if you go out and you bang pans and ring bells or smash plates and you make all this noise, you're just like scaring off the evil eyes. So carry on, if that's not a tradition you do. There are so many cool superstitions. So if you grew up in a family didn't have any, look them up. Especially look at the ones from Mexico. There's like this thing about eating a ton of grapes and taking your like taking luggage outside so you travel. Like, there's so many fun things, so many fun things you can do. So look up something like that, figure out something fun for you to do, but also try to like release the baggage. And then on New Year's Day, I usually do a blessing. Like, so I cleanse the house on New Year's Eve, I bless the house on New Year's Day, I usually um redo all the windows and doorways with their black salt on the inside. I usually will like make sure all my crystals are in place, cleanse up my talismans the night before, and bless them with oil the next day, and really just kind of bless. And the other thing I like to do on New Year's is eat black-eyed peas because my husband's from his family's from Georgia, so eating those for good luck. Um eat collard greens in them for money. You can use some other kind of green if you don't like collards. Um we also like to go outside. My husband and I originally, New Year's Day I would spend at Venice Beach when I was younger with my friend, and then it became a hike with my husband. And so we still do that to this day. So we get outside somewhere. I want to spend the new year in nature, and I'm gonna tell you a cool story about that in a second, um, as a way to just like start it off doing something I love, starting off connected with the land, starting off connected with the family. Like it's so important to me to do that. I also believe there's a superstition that whatever you do on New Year's, you're gonna do the rest of the year. So that's why I like to get outside and I like to be with my family and I like to do some things I enjoy. So back to what I want to tell you is so every year we've hiked on New Year's, and 2020. Uh had no idea what 2020 would hold. But we went on this hike. This is when we still lived in California, and we would go to a place called Silverwood Lake. It's a man-made lake in the Mojave Desert, really beautiful um hiking area, pretty cold, it's wooded. Um, sometimes we'd see bald eagles, just really beautiful. And I always hike at the so the way we hike is because we have kids. Husband leads, children in the middle, I'm in the back. That's for safety, right? It's nothing to do with like anything but that. Um if he's in front, he sees a bear or a cougar. I'm in the back, I can grab a kid, like safety. Um, and I'm also the slowest, so there's that. I'm a Taurus, I meander. And so we were all hiking, and they're ahead of me, so I'm the last one on the trail. And I look to the left, and I'm like, what is that? I just see all this bright red. And I stopped the family and they all come back. We saw thousands of ladybugs or ladybirds, if you're from England, hibernating. Like, I don't know what happened. Somehow they decided to move. They like get they're close together like one being, um, kind of like a rat king type situation, like they look like one thing. And they were in the process of relocating under leaves, which is why people, so many foragers and other people who love the earth will tell you to leave your leaves because they hibernate. And there were just thousands, and we just stood there for a good, we were the only ones on the trail, a good 20 minutes. There were people definitely ahead of us and behind us, just in awe. And by the time we were done being in awe and watching them, they were all hidden again. So the people going by were never gonna see them. It was like a message just for our family. And 2020, we all know it happened. 2020 was also the year we moved, and my husband changed jobs. And if I didn't I held on to those ladybugs all year, so when there was a toilet paper crisis, I'm like, no, the ladybugs, they mean good luck. Luck's on my side, and I just really believed that, and I was like able to find toilet paper. We're moving with two cats and a dog during COVID and children. No, we're gonna be able to use public restrooms, like it's gonna happen. Everything honestly worked out for the best and the best it could, and I feel like those ladybugs were such a direct sign from spirit saying, Hey kids, things are about to get rough, but it's gonna be okay. And I'll never ever forget that experience. I've always loved ladybugs ever since I was little, but that took it to a whole new level. Absolutely love them. So I'm not saying if you get outside, you're gonna see something super cool like that. But I'm just saying, like always read the signs, right? And definitely get out there. I want you to create your own traditions this New Year's, right? As witches, we can do whatever we want. So, you know, you can do a spell jar for New Year's, you can do whatever. You can create it, like it's a liminal space. That's how I always think about midnight on New Year's Eve's liminal. So my friends and I used to always do witchcraft and then spend the next day in Venice trying to manifest some hot guy, right? Like honestly, um, or in a cool thrift find. Uh so I want you to think about that. Look up superstitions, look up rituals, but make it your own. Make a tradition. So if you don't have a New Year's tradition, find one. It's super fun. Um I hope you have a blast, and I hope 2026 treats you well. Bless it be.