Yule and the Winter Solstice arrive at the most honest point of the year. We are huddled in the dark together, and we cannot hide. The longest night doesn't promise ease or cheer. It marks a reality: the sun has reached its furthest edge, and life has drawn inward to endure. Here on these old mountains in Québec, on never-ceded Anishinaabe territory, in these cancer bodies, gendered bodies, anxious, tired, life-giving, sorrow-filled, laughter bubbling bodies, we feel the ancient dark pressing against our windows.
We light candles in the mornings when we wake up and it's still dark.
The cold creeps in through every stitch, between our cells, settles in our bones, and we sit with it, make our offerings material and magical, and then turn our faces toward the slow arc of light returning.
To be rooted where we are, to turn off the noise and to reach with all our love into this place, this chosen family, these four walls, the food we can muster and the gifts we can share, is to enter the season with reciprocity — tending relationships, the land, ourselves, and the webs we inhabit.
For those devoted to land-based spiritual practices, for witches, for all those paying attention, this season is rich in invitations to make reparations: material, ecological, and relational. This season is a cosy timeless vibe and a harsh reality. A time we need each other so much we ritualize our gifts. Winters have always been dangerous. Survival has always depended on story, song, care, and community.
This page offers Yule rituals, Winter Solstice practices – crafts, songs, things we've gathered or invented to help us survive and make meaning — ways to remember the spiral: light grows, tides turn, fascists and abusers die, and our magic survives. But remember, the simplest way to make magic this season is to give. Bake for a neighbour, bring sweaters, coats, blankets, tampons, warm socks to a shelter, set up a recurring donation even if it's 5$, crochet a scarf and leave it on a lamp post with a note: For You, Whoever Needs This. I love You." Care is the deepest form of magic, and an offering we can make to the warmth that promises to return.
Solstice, Yule, and Midsummer Across the Hemispheres
The Winter Solstice is the astronomical pivot of the year: the shortest day, the longest night. Across cultures, across eons, it mattered because it shaped survival. The sun will return. The sky keeps its promise.
Yule, in Northern Hemisphere traditions, marks midwinter. Rituals honour returning light, the slow rebirth of the sun, the measuring and sharing of our stores, the taste of all our labour and all the Earth's generous flourishing from the year before. We honour the way we need each other, the way our lives are tied to each other with red ribbons.
In the Southern Hemisphere, this same solstice is midsummer — the day of highest sun, abundant growth, and long light. Plants, animals, and humans alike move differently under its arc.
Ecosystems don't obey human lines, at best we draw their outlines in caves trying to capture their traces as they go running past us, through us. They spill across borders, calendars, and marketing seasons.
In our coven, and in many online circles, we meet from all around the world — different daylights and temperatures, different plant and animal kin in circle with us. We celebrate Winter Solstice and Midsummer together. We borrow these Wiccan rituals, Yule, Litha, a pastiche made in the 50s-70s, rooted in specific places and borrowed from other cultures, but they don't define us. They are ways to trace ourselves toward each other in darkness or blinding light. Toward the circle. Ways to create the quiet where we can hear each other.
To stop and remember: we are part of the heaving dance life of Terra, of Gaia. However you choose to craft or improvise your celebration of these days, let's use these moments to sing I love you to the world and reach for deeper relation.
Missing Witches: Yule & Winter Solstice Episodes
Every year, we return to Yule. We sang punk versions of carols, waved at Santa in very low budget holiday parades, sat with candles and told stories together for a decade before starting the Missing Witches podcast, so we continue to celebrate now in that gleeful spirit. These episodes are seasonal gatherings shaped by story, song, poetry, the gathering of chosen family, the widening of our circle.
Missing Witches Coven Yuletide Special 2024
Every year the Missing Witches Coven gathers together at Yuletide to share our warmth, our cheer, our hopes and our fears, our stories, songs, and poems,\; to light each other's paths through the dark time of the year. Welcome to The Missing Witches Winter Solstice Celebration and Yuletide Special!!
Missing Witches 2023 Yuletide Special and Solstice Party
Twice makes it a tradition! Once again, we gather with the coven and invite you to make yourself a cup of tea, imagine sitting by a cozy cracking fire with your coven for Winter Solstice.
Missing Witches Yuletide Special 2022: Happy Talking Together (Santa Is A Mushroom)
The Missing Witches Coven gathers together for the first time to sing and tell stories for Winter Solstice - the longest night of our year. Folklore, humour, and ancestral mutation sparkle in the night.
Missing Witches Yuletide Special 2021: A Council of Soul Mates
In this episode it's just Amy + Risa, co-founders of Missing Witches, talking about the coldest season and the great gift of reminding each other who we are.
Missing Witches Yuletide Special 2020 w/ Jinkx Monsoon & Kenneth Friend
After winning RuPaul's Drag Race the first time, and before returning to win Queen of All Queens in the name of Hekate Queen of the Witches, Jinkx unmasks with Missing Witches and her best friend, Kenneth Friend.
Missing Witches Yuletide Special 2019! Chosen Family with Monefa and the Gahds!! Five Years before Uma Gahd starred on Canada's Drag Race, she brought the magic of chosen family to the Missing Witches Podcast.
Missing Witches Yuletide Special 2018
Our first ever Yule Special. We send a shout-out and hallelujah to the goddesses of winter, of death, and of the distant coming spring. And to trickster wives and to their daughters, to the oracles and the mediums and the muses, to the snow spiders and the storm hags. To all of you – identities erased or denied – who have been part of it always.
Rituals for the Longest Night
These are rituals of orientation. They help us trace ourselves toward each other, toward the land, and toward the quiet where we can listen. Take a breath and let the weight of consumption and perfectionism fall from your shoulders. These are invitations to play with the sacred.
A Simmer Pot for Health and Good Spirits
Fill a pot with water and add citrus peels, spices, and respectful plant matter. Let it simmer, filling your home with scent and warmth. This is practical, ancestral magic: tending air, mood, and attention.
Sit in the Dark
Turn off lights, screens, and background noise. Let darkness become a space of attention. 99.9% of humanity lived this way. Firelight, moonlight, starlight — darkness isn't empty; it carries texture, sound, and presence. Black isn't evil, it's alive, it's a twist in the spiral. Stay long enough to feel yourself dissolving into It All. Let the mask slip. You are not required to perform.
Candle and Witness
Light one candle. Watch how light behaves in the dark. Notice the interplay of shadow and illumination. This is not about banishing darkness, but keeping company with it.
Writing and Mark-Making Without Looking
Have a beloved writing or drawing tool and a large sheet of paper at hand. In the dark or with a single candle lit, using your non-dominant hand, trace, write, or draw without aiming for meaning. Words, forms, patterns, impulses may emerge. Set it where you will see it in the morning. Free write about what you see while you imagine and feel the light returning.
Sound as Seasonal Orientation
Sing carols or galdr (chant or yell) into a glass of water. Drum, rattle, or use your breath and hands. Let sound move through the dark without rhythm or structure. Sound has always helped humans find each other in the winter. Say I am here, mark presence.
Walk a Spiral
In your yard or in a park, in snow or sand, make a large spiral path. Walk to the centre slowly. Talk to the centre. Leave whatever you need to behind. Walk the spiral slowly to return.
Witch Crafts and Seasonal Making
- Evergreen work: Gather and form wreaths, garlands, and bundles from fallen branches. Fill your home with smells and shapes that honour continuity.
- Dry slices of citrus and hang across windows, let the smell and the glow remind you of the returning light.
- Make orange pomanders be decorating an orange with cloves. Go further using a small knife or carving tool to add geometric designs, think of snowflakes.
- Create a Yule log or its opposite: Wrap papers or other safely burnable items representing things you want to release around a log, decorate with evergreen, berries, herbs, and in a safe fireplace or firepit let it burn. Or make a log for remembering. What are you not releasing fro this year? Wrap farbics, notes, symbols, stitch and mend with bright embroidery thread and put it on your altar. Add to it yearly. Make it a mutant art project testifying to your own spirals.
- Handmade seasonal gifts: Sachets, written blessings, or food made slowly. Resist extraction; insist on time and care.
Songs and Seasonal Listening
Sing old songs to soothe your ancestors, or to require the power of their faiths to bring hope to the world now. Or invent your own carols! We did!
- Missing Witches Solstice Carols
- Deepest Darkness, Brightest Dawn — Music by Gaelynn Lea
This album by our beloved coven mate holds the solstice in it — moving from deepest darkness toward brightest dawn. An offering of sonic presence, a guide through slipping snow and shifting seasons for tender hearts.
Community Yule & Seasonal Offerings
- A Grounding Meditation for Navigating Holiday Family Dynamics
Lise Lonsemann offers a meditation designed to help people sit with the emotional complexity of family during the holidays. This work meets the long night with compassion and somatic awareness. - Hand-Drawn Lunar Calendar 2026
A hand-drawn lunar calendar for the coming year — a seasonal tool for tracking moon phases, intention cycles, and embodied rhythm. In a time when the Earth’s cycles are under strain, choosing hand-made, thoughtful calendrics is itself an act of resistance.
(Note: You’ll find many more seasonal offerings and coven-only discount codes in the Witch Market inside the Missing Witches coven space.)
Gathering and Community
Solstice reminds us that survival is collective. Community changes how we move through dark and light. Whether in Québec, elsewhere in the north, or across hemispheres online, we reach for each other, trace ourselves toward the spiral, and hold the quiet where we can hear one another. The Missing Witches Coven is open for seasonal practice, shared ritual, and relational care.
Grounding Questions
- Is Yule religious? No — it is a seasonal observance rooted in the turning Earth.
- Do I need joy to celebrate? No — The Solstice makes room for grief, fatigue, anger, darkness and light twisting endlessly.
- Will things get better? The spiral promises movement. Light will grow. Tides will turn. And tonight, in the dark or streaming light, we are allowed to rest.
