welcome to season 2 of the snort & cackle podcast! today, your host ash alberg will be talking about the ritual of knitting and how #knitwitch life manifests in every aspect of their life (at least when shit's healthy). as we head into deep winter here in the northern hemisphere, aka rest season/hibernation mode according to our ancestors, rituals shift and become even more important as we have less sunlight to structure our days and guide our work. ash talks about being a seasonal creature, the constant search for balance (does that even exist?), and how making as a love language helps to make the winter holiday season a little more enjoyable.

each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #snortandcacklebookclub, with a book review by ash and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. this season's #snortandcacklebookclub read is "orishas, goddesses, and voodoo queens" by lilith dorsey.

take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!

seasons 1-3 of snort & cackle are generously supported by the manitoba arts council.

transcript

snort & cackle - season 2, episode 1 - #knitwitch rituals

ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast. I'm your host, Ash Alberg. I'm a queer fibre witch and hedgewitch. And each week I interview a fellow boss witch to discuss how everyday magic helps them make their life and the wider world, a better place.

Expect serious discussions about intersections of privilege and oppression, big C versus small C capitalism, rituals, sustainability, astrology, ancestral work, and a whole lot of snorts and cackles. Each season, we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens by Lilith Dorsey.

Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.

Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]

Hello, and welcome to season two of Snort and Cackle. I'm so glad that you are able to join me. Thank you for everyone who has ... who listened to season one. If you haven't, feel free to go back through your feed and listen to all of those episodes.

And here we are ready to start season two and we have just passed Samhain, of my favorite times of year. Season two is actually going to be overlapping with my true favorite time of the year, which is Yule season, but I do have a deep love of Samhain. And being here in the Northern hemisphere and all my ancestral ties are here in the north as well, this is a time of winter. [Chuckles.]

So we are going to be getting colder and the snow is falling and will be falling. And it is very much a time of hibernation and rooting back in and rest. And it is basically the antithesis of what capitalism wants us to do, which is to be working at high capacity all the fucking time. That's not how seasons work and I consider myself blessed to have grown up in and be a creature of very distinct seasons.

I do live in a land of extremes and depending on when you are listening to this, if it is closer to deep winter -40 degrees Celsius is super normal where I live. That's fun.

And as we are starting off, kicking off a season two, the season will be the normal structure as was already distinguished with season one, which is that this first episode, I welcome you to our season and to our new batch of guests. And then we will have 11 episodes of guests.

There will be a slight shift in the season two, just because during Yule I'm giving us all a break, including me, and there will actually be a Yule story that I share with you instead of having an episode. But otherwise we're going to be having lots of interviews with lots of fabulous other witches and witchy-type folks.

And then we will be closing things off with our Snort and Cackle book club. Our book for the season is Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens by Lilith Dorsey. And I'm very excited for that book.

I will also be joined by a guest hosts for that particular episode because I am definitely not of those origins as far as ancestral ties to all of that, which is from the African diaspora. So I will be joined by folks who have ties within that so that they can speak more to those things. But we're going to be reading a fantastic book, which I’m very excited about and I highly recommend it to anybody else.

Yeah, that'll be our book for the season and I'm excited to get to that episode at the end of the season. This season we will be running from Samhain through to Imbolg and then season three will kick us off during Imbolg.

And just like season one, season two is gratefully supported, I say grateful, thankfully supported by the Manitoba Arts Council. So thanks y'all for that.

And today I am going to be chatting a bit about, and by a bit, the whole episode, about ritual. This is a time of year that for me, ritual becomes really important and very specific rituals. It's also time of year where my ... I actually celebrate the Sabbats. I actually tend to not really celebrate the other ones.

I ... I appreciate harvest season. But I don't necessarily mark Mabon or Lughnasadh or honestly even like Imbolg, I mark in the way that I just need a self-care check-in by the time February rolls around and it's been, been living in deep winter for what feels like forever. But yeah, Samhain and Yule are like really my thing. I really love the ritual that both bring with them.

And in my family, both are very heavy in ritual. And in particular Yule season is quite heavy in ritual. It is also all of the wool layer seasons here. It's fucking cold. Like I said, -40 degrees Celsius is pretty normal.

And so for that reason, I get to wear all of the wool and wool socks just live on my feet all the time. And then I toss on either like really thick wool slippers on top of that or house moccasins or yeah. Definitely either of those are just consistently on my feet when I’m inside. When I’m outside then I've got even like more intense boots.

And then, yeah. And you're wearing a wool sweater, no matter what. And then you go outside and you've got even more layers of wool. It's very normal for me to have three scarves slash shawls slash cowls on when I am walking Willow.

It's ... and then usually I have a pair of hand shoes followed by a pair of mittens on top of my hands. Yeah, it's just, it's really fucking cold. [Chuckles.] And so I need my layers. So this is really what I like to think of as knit witch season.

And yeah, I guess for those of you who are not as familiar with me and with my work, hi, I'm Ash, I'm your host of this podcast, if that was not already very evident. And I am a knit witch and a fiber witch and hedgewitch.

And on the knit witch side of things, I help other fiber witches to connect, create and get confident in particular through knitwear design and natural dyeing. And I provide products for fellow fiber witches to do those things as well. Whether they want to go like really deep dive and make a biz out of it and/or they just want to make some really lovely things and wrap themselves in beautiful things and care for their body in the same chunk of time that they're doing those things.

Of all of my ... I have a quiz because I'm a nerd and I love the Buzzfeed quiz, the personality quizzes. That's how I waste time when I just needed to veg out a little bit. And so I thought, “Why don't I create my own?” because that's how I function. And so I created the free fiber witch quiz which you can find on the website. It's also linked in the show notes, ashalberg.com/quiz.

And so your three options that you can get are boss witch, plant witch, or knit witch. And it's because I do a lot of different things. Anybody who's done marketing is taught that you can only focus on one thing at one time. And as an Aries, I deeply dislike that concept. [Chuckles.]

I have ping-pong brain all the time. And I also like, I'm a multi-passionate creative. I love to do all the things. I get really nerdy and I like dive in for something, bring my head up and I dive in for something else. And the Sagittarius in me just wants to be constantly learning new things.

And so for those reasons, I have a really hard time just focusing on a single thing and by pulling everything under this lovely umbrella of fiber witches, then it allows me to distill what it is that I am doing. And then with the fiber witch quiz, the nice thing about it is that folks can self-determine via the quiz what is the best thing that I have to offer that can help you on the particular journey that you're looking for at this particular time.

I, myself, consider myself all of these things. I am a boss witch and a plant witch and a knit witch, frequently all in the same day. Yeah. But definitely depending on like where my focus and energies lie, then I go into maybe one mode a little bit more.

And so I feel like a lot of folks, and actually I see this on my newsletter results, there are folks who will take the quiz multiple times and actually get multiple results because they are similarly like me, multi-passionate. Other folks, one is very much what they are. But the nice thing about it is that instead of me trying to guess what it is that maybe you want me to help you with, then you can self determine that via the quiz and then be given a clear direction of “Okay, cool. You're interested in this thing. So check this out.”

If you're a knit witch and you don't give a fuck about running a business, you're like very comfortable with the way that income comes into your life at this point in time, so that you can do the things that you need to and be a happy human in the world, you really don't want to take my Creative Coven design course. If you want to learn how to design, then you can join me for a live class. But the

Creative Coven online design course is like a really intense, very biz focused like step-by-step program that has way more information than you actually need if all you're interested in is maybe at some point designing your own pair of socks.

If that's what you're interested in, then join the Creative Coven community instead and do the Creative Coven challenge, which exists 24/7 in the community. And just find that yes, you are a creative creature and yes, here's a way into unlocking that creativity and kind of like harnessing it and using it for something specific. And then take that and stick it on your favorite sock pattern, recipe, and roll from there. Like you don't then need to know social media boundaries and branding and financial spreadsheets and stuff like that. You don't need those things.

And if you don't give a fuck about natural dye – the yarn that I sell is natural dyed - but if you're not interested in learning how to naturally dye yourself, probably plant witch is not going to be the thing that you end up with. Maybe you are all of those things.

So yeah, so that's the fiber witch quiz, and it's how I structure myself. And like I said, I find that winter season really becomes my knit witch season. And Yule ... Samhain to Yule really feels like knit witch season because I find that like post-Yule and post-Christmas season - I say Christmas because it really does define specifically the shopping season here in Canada at least slash the west - that as a result of that, then January through March becomes my boss witch season where I'm able to like decompress from the busiest quarter of the year and take a step back and reset and look at my goals and make sure that I am going in the direction that I am aiming for.

And if I'm not, then, do I actually like this tangent or do I need to scoop it back in? And summer season, spring through autumn is really plant witch delight season. And that's because here again, I live in a very distinct seasonal ecosystem and space and climate.

And so our growing season is quite short. It's also really intense and really delicious and beautiful. And so I find that I'm prepping my gardens and keeping an eye out for those first signs of growth and spring, post-dormant season. And then it becomes growing season and then harvest season.

And my dye pots are on the go and my medicinal work is on the go. And I'm drying things and storing things and preserving. And so harvest season becomes

extremely busy for me, just trying to stay on top of all the plans that I'm trying to gather, so that then like a squirrel in the winter, once everything is covered in a couple of feet of snow, that I have what I need to then be functioning.

And actually once I am done recording this episode, I will be harvesting and making a forager’s syrup because the window for my pansies is starting to shrink. And then through Yule season is really knit witch season for me. And knit witch I find, I define my knit witchness and my knit witches as the most chill out of everybody.

And not chill in terms of the way that you roll through life necessarily, but in terms of the way that I'm approaching and making practice, the goal is really to be making. Like making is your love language and it's ... and so that season for me becomes not just about ... yes, it's busy season and so I'm kept very busy staying on top of stock and filling orders and filling wholesale orders and just dealing with, when it's not COVID season, then like markets and when it is COVID season, then online markets.

And it keeps me really busy in that aspect work-wise but it is also the time of year where I am thinking about what do I need to make? The season shift makes me look at my clothing and think OK, do I have what I need to head into this next season? Do I have the layers that I need?

Did something, does something need to be mended? Does something need to be added? Is there a gap in my wardrobe? Have I been wearing something through the summer and it's now worn it through to a stage where again, it's cold. Like threadbare clothes might work when it's +30, but not as much when it's -30. Do I need to make new versions and new duplicates of things?

And how many socks do I need to knit? And also let's wash all of the socks and have them ready and dry and in the drawer so that they're ready to be going on my feet. And then thinking about holiday gifts, because I love ... making is my love language and so I love to make holiday gifts for people.

And so I, I really take the full season. I honestly, I get started during harvest season and earlier in harvest season, prepping and making things and making big batches of preserves and starting to make soaps so that they're cured in time and all of that, so that by the time it is gift-giving season in the cold December months ... Months as though it's plural, but sometimes it feels ... then you know, I'm not scrambling. Because I know I will scramble on at least one person's gift, but I don't want to scramble on everybody's gifts. So I really like,

for me, the gift giving season is a very long extended process because I am making through that full season to be in preparation for then gift giving.

And so yeah, as a knit witch, it's really, it's my time. And I love it a lot. And I sink more into those making rituals in a way that I loosen them a little bit over the rest of the year. And once the cold weather starts to hit and it ... September, it gets me back into routines.

October really starts it. And by November, by November snow’s on the ground and it's really time to, to be like ready and in it. And it's dark. I don't live as far north as other folks that I know, but by ... as we're heading towards Yule, by 5:00 PM, absolutely it's dark.

It's certainly by 4:30. And once it's close to Yule, 4:00 PM it's dark and it was dark at 9:00 AM. And I remember the days of living and working a nine to five job and I would come to work and it would be pitch black and I would leave work and it would be pitch black. And that was hard.

And by pitch black, I live and work in a city, so it's not pitch black, but it really ... I am not a human who makes a point of really spending a lot of time, especially in a city ... when I am elsewhere, when I'm in the woods, then I have a slightly different relationship with the dark.

But in the city, I often don't really go out in the dark. It really does change my day to day and the way that I consider what is my outside time versus my inside time. And COVID has also influenced that quite significantly for a couple of years.

So my rituals become much more home-based and there is this sense, especially in my city, we joke that everybody hibernates and I say that we also are an area where we take pride in how cold it gets. We might complain about it incessantly, but we do take pride in being able to handle the cold. And so we also actually have a lot more activities that are ... and festivals and things that celebrate the cold compared to other similarly cold spaces.

And come Imbolc season, Festival du Voyageur will be happening. And that is just like ... I think also we all need to brighten the mood by that point in time ‘cause it's been ... Yule season past quite a while before. And it's been a chunk of time and we all need something to celebrate by that point in the winter season.

But yeah, at the beginning of the winter season, you're just getting yourself back into hibernation where things move a little slower. Even though it can feel a little bit more chaotic, you're starting to get cozy. Hot drinks become a thing again. You're cooking big meals at home that are like hearty stews and casseroles and lasagnas and things like that are lots of like rib-sticking goodness.

Fresh bread becomes a constant again. And you actually want your stove on, whereas during the summer months you're like, what the fuck, I want nothing to do with this heat. Let me barbecue if I absolutely must, otherwise I'm going to eat raw food because I have to get nutrients in my body or I will just live off of ice cream and popsicles for three or four months. I'm semi-known to do that as well. And so are some of my friends, so I take some comfort in that.

But yeah I feel like knit witch time really starts to encapsulate this and I don't know, and I'm curious for those of you ... I know some of you listeners are listening from the other hemisphere from the south, so I'd actually be super curious to hear your experience of heading into this season. How you view that and also heading into your own winter season.

I think another really interesting part of just the globe and the way that we feel things is that if we remove the element of altitude, because of course, if you're high up in the mountains, it's going to snow no matter what. It doesn't matter what country we're talking about, which I think is a really cool thing about mountains. But there's significantly less inhabited landmass in the Southern hemisphere that goes as close to the pole as it does here in the Northern hemisphere.

I think that's a really interesting thing about landmass, I think that’s an interesting thing about the globe. But I also think that it probably dictates a lot for us in terms of our structures and our folklore and our traditions and just the way that we function generally. And yeah, I wonder about that because I've always existed in the north. And I've traveled quite a bit, but all of my travel has still remained in the north. And I, for myself, I know that the further away from the poles I go, the more comfortable I feel. Sorry, the further away from the equator I go, the more comfortable I feel.

And yeah, there's something deeply familiar about like boreal and also tundra spaces. Yeah, I dunno, my bones like it a lot. Also I think my bones just

appreciate not having too much humidity, making them ache. They have a hard time with dampness, which is also why I no longer live on the coast.

But yeah, this is a time where ... seasonal transition shift and especially, I think the darkness ... I link this back to our prehistoric ... but not even fully prehistoric, just pre- honestly industrialization period. And the traditions that are rooted in that, and for me, much of my witchcraft is rooted in those old traditions.

There needs to naturally be a time of year where you do rest and harvest season is so fucking exhausting that you and the animals just move a little slower in winter. There's also just less to do. You are ... [yawns] Pardon me! You are rejuvenating your body, resting, and then taking stock of things and starting to get ready for the next season again.

It's also a time where you actually ... expelling too much energy can be dangerous because depending on what the harvest was, you don't want to be eating up too much because you are expelling too much energy. You need to be literally conserving stores. And it, it can be tricky for us, I think, especially when we live in urban spaces, urban modern spaces. There is light around us all the time. And so it actually is quite easy to continue living life as though the season hasn't shifted.

But when you live outside of those urban spaces and in particular, if you are living off grid and operating more so with natural light and with candles and lamps and things like that you become much more cognizant of, “it's dark” and there's not as much that you can do. And it hurts your eyes to be doing super fine work when there's not as much light. And so there is just this natural desire to rest.

There's also potentially a natural correlation with that and the number of stories that we start to tell during this season, and we tell stories by the firelight and the legends that ... and the folklore that kind of overlap with this particular season are quite different from the folklore that happens for summer months.

And yeah there's just something that's ... and you're also a little bit more at the whims of nature. The cold can be really brutal and the animals feel it too. And if it was a hard season for them, then predators, you have to be more aware of in the winter because they're starving.

And when we go back far enough - and we don't need to go that far back, honestly, in the scheme of the globe's history - the winter months really bring with them at different set of experiences and dangers and potential dangers that also engender this really interesting relationship with story and also just encouraging us to stay at home and stay behind closed doors, away from the wind, away from the wild, safe from the wolves. The giving offerings to the wolves and the bears and things like that, so that they don't come after you or the livestock when it gets too cold and they don't have as much food available.

There's just, yeah, there's something really interesting about all of those stories that can pop up as a result. And it's also you’re home, you're at hearth more. You are also, you are able to work by firelight. And so it's also the time where, okay, we're going to be mending our clothes and we're going to be making more layers of clothes where we're going to be sewing and knitting. And it's a time for a textile person to really be able to sit back down with their work because they're not being drawn in as many different directions away from their work.

Yeah, I don't know necessarily where I'm going with this, but all this to say that this season is very much knit witch season for me and it's a time where I return to many of my rituals and in particular, my ritual of making. And I guess for me, knitting has always been a ritual.

I am also, I have identified my entire adult life as an anxious bean and that is starting to shift because my relationship with my anxiety is starting to shift. And that's an interesting thing in and of itself. But as a creature who always needs something to do with their hands, knitting has always been a safe thing for me.

And it also socially, like when COVID was not a thing and we would go out to places, as a young queer going to house parties in Halifax then, or Kjipuktuk, it was something that I could rely on where if I was ... if I didn't feel like socializing with strangers, I didn't have to, because I could just look at my knitting and I would have something to do and it didn't feel as awkward being in a room.

But if I was in a room with other knitters, which was frequent, it would actually start conversations. And so it was this way of navigating social spaces that felt very safe for me. And I have always, pretty much always knit.

My mum taught me when I was a child. She taught me how to knit left-handed because I was, and still am such a lefty that she knew I would not catch on as an adult or as a right-handed knitter. So I literally knit backwards and I also do this

funny thing where ... so maybe what I'll do is I'll accompany this episode with a video of my hands knitting or something.

I also, I deeply love hand portraits. I think people's hands are one of the most beautiful parts of their bodies and also one of the most interesting parts of their bodies. And I think our hands tell so much about us and I also love how hands betray our ages. It is something that ... and our stories as a result of that, right?

Like I, especially in a society that just is constantly trying to avoid aging and the way that people alter their faces in order to make it seem as though they are not aging as much as they do, their hands always betray it. And I love that about hands so much because they're more honest. They also indicate what do we do with our bodies and what do we do with our time and how do we function in and around the world.

And for myself, my, my relationship with my hands is a funny one. I appreciate my hands. I also have Raynaud's syndrome and so I have really poor circulation in my hands. 90% of the year they're extremely cold. Maybe 3% of the year, they're a comfortable temperature and then the other 7% they're unbearably hot.

So a very short chunk of time where I have hands that feel comfortable to me. Really useful if you have a fever, that's about it. And I also, on my mom's side, genetically, we used to joke that my Nan wouldn't be able to hitchhike if she wanted to, because her thumbs went in different directions. And so at the joints, the fingers just start going every which way.

And I remember when I lived in Kjipuktuk, my Nan came in for surgery to town on her, I believe it was her right hand, because that ... and she was like in her nineties by this point, but the hand at that point was just so gnarled that she couldn't ... the doctors were like, okay, we are going to fix this one for you. Which you know, doing surgery on a 90-something year-old is not something that you just casually do.

So you know, it was significant enough that they wanted to go in and correct the level of gnarled-ness that had started. I think also there's something about hands and roots and trees that I find really interesting. Anyway. So genetically I anticipate that, and I also am aware that some of my fingers are already going in different directions and probably will continue.

My mum's fingers have not started to do this, but my aunt’s certainly have. And with the way that I use my hands with my knitting, I'm aware that I am just

inviting that history of arthritis and osteoporosis and shitty joints. Like all of it. I am just inviting it to come at an exponentially earlier chunk of my life than it would otherwise.

And I choose that. And it does mean that I do have to be ... I think this knit witch season is also a time where I do become more cognizant of my hand and wrist self-care than I necessarily am other times of the year. And that is partially because I'm just using them more. It's also because the cold weather hurts my joints more.

And I literally like, the reason I wear mittens and hand shoes. So I wear hand shoes underneath my mittens. My hand shoes are so that my palm stays warmer. And so then that helps it, it's like the core of my hand. It's like the torso of my hand. And then I wear mittens, not gloves, because if my fingers are separated in gloves, no matter what the kind of glove is, I will get frostbite because I do not have circulation.

So my fingers need to stay together and often I will actually pull my thumbs in with the rest of them and I'll just be walking along and Willow’s leash is just looped on my wrist. And then I just hope that I don't have to like quickly scoop my thumb out to, to grab a better hold of her leash.

But yeah, I have this really interesting relationship with my hands. That then as a result requires me to be more loving of them and more cognizant of them and their needs than I am during the rest of the year. So I do a lot more massage. I use my joint salve much more religiously than I do the rest of the year.

I will do hot baths for them. And I try to be kind to them as I rub them together to try and heat them a little bit. [Soft, whispery sound of Ash’s hands rubbing together.] But there's ... it's a time where I also rely on them a lot more and I take comfort and hope in the fact that my Nan's hands were a mess and she still knit right up until she died.

She baked every single morning. And she also refused to use machines that would have made her life easier. She was like, no I'm kneading the bread by hand and I'm gonna mix these things by hand. And I appreciate that a lot. I also am like extremely aware of that as much as I deeply love ... I have always really loved baking because it has ... whenever I've had weird feelings that I need to process, I literally process them through the act of baking from scratch.

And whether I am kneading dough or I am mixing a cookie batter by hand, I really love it. I'm also extremely aware that already in my early thirties it hurts my hands and my wrists in a way that I probably am not going to be able to do it to the extent that I wish I could for as long as I would like to.

KitchenAid mixer is going to be a thing that I do need to invest in earlier than I would otherwise. But it's just, like being aware of those things and like building ways of engaging with the limitations that are there and acknowledging them and respecting them, and also not letting them fully stop me from doing things. Figuring out, is there a tool that I can use that will allow me to do this in a way that is kinder to my body so I can do the act for longer?

Is the act itself that I care about? Is that the thing that I do with my hands that is part of the ritual that I care most deeply about? Like I said, making is my love language. Making for me is also extremely ritualistic regardless of what it is I am making. It’s the time of year where I'm knitting a lot more.

I am potentially sewing more for myself and also for others. It's also a time of year that I am cooking and baking and in my kitchen significantly more. And so the kitchen witch in me gets a lot of use. And the ritual of making food to be shared is something that ... I spend a lot of time in the kitchen and I try to just enjoy what is happening and savor it. And I want to be in my kitchen.

I enjoy the scent of what is happening. I enjoy that multisensory experience. It's also a time where music becomes really important and I am singing different songs and listening to certain music. And there's the same ... my brother, and much to my dad's chagrin, there's a particular obscure Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas cassette tape. There's some age aging right there for you.

And it's not the one you're thinking of. I know which one you're thinking of. This is not the one. This one has an A side and a B side, and it has Alvin and the Chipmunks with a bunch of different guests, including Celine Dion and Kenny G. And it's a whole, a whole thing.

And they are singing different Christmas songs. And I think there might, I don't even know if there's a Hanukkah song on there. It's like very much ... and it like, it's, it ... some of them, I think the Celine Dion one is a more religious one. But a lot of them, there's like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. There's Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.

It's a very fun cassette tape. And my brother and I, as children, would literally from December 1st, have it on repeat the whole month long. And then, my poor dad hated it. And there was one year where we couldn't find it and we couldn't find it for several years.

And we just assumed that my dad had hit his limit and got rid of the tape. And then when I was, I think it was when I was in university doing my undergrad, I came home for Christmas. And because Christmas is what we celebrate in my family. Christmas is really important on both sides of the family and within our nuclear unit family.

And I just deeply love it because it's so heavily ritual heady for me, in terms of food and movies we watch and music we hear and gathering with the extended family and just all of it. There's, Santa always forgets and comes a day early and leaves a thing in our stocking and then we are always allowed to open our stockings before everyone else wakes up on Christmas morning, but you're not allowed to unwrap the presents. Like it's very much like, we do it every year the same way. And in my early thirties, I've yet to miss a year. It's going to be weird, whatever year I do change.

But yeah it, it's a ritual heavy thing for us. And so we just assumed that my dad had gotten rid of this cassette tape, and I came home and I was ... there was this like CD cassette player that I was trying to ... I think I was just like opening up to put a cassette in because a lot of our Christmas music exists on cassettes still. And it was in there! And I was like, oh my god!

And I got so excited and I told my brother and he was like, oh my god. And we have made a slight compromise for my dad that we will only listen to it like around the three days around Christmas rather than the whole month. But it's yeah, a time of year that I do really love.

And Samhain’s similar for me. I always trick or treated as a kid. And we had fewer rituals around Samhain, but now for me and my witchness, I feel like Saimhain has become a more important time of year. And Samhain has just passed by the time you're listening to this episode. But yeah, there's just, there's something about this time of year between the songs that I listened to and the songs that I sing. I grew up singing and was always in choir until I moved away and that just became harder to fit into my life.

And I just deeply appreciate a good choral arrangement. And Yule time is a good time to hear beautiful choral arrangements. It's easy. It ... that's like the

one church thing that I am okay with. And I think it's also why when I hear chanting in other religions and other religious spaces, it's something that I can connect to because I don't associate it so much with the organized religion or particular faith set that is attached to the song. And I appreciate it more about humans needing music and how it reverberates through our bones. And we just, we need it. It's the thing that connects us and that like a primal necessity as far as I'm concerned.

So yeah, knit witch season. I guess what I'm going to offer for you, I've been waxing poetic now for 45-ish minutes and probably that’s long enough for me to be waxing poetic. So what I'm going to leave you with is an offering for looking at your own rituals at this time of year, regardless of where you live, regardless of what you celebrate and what your faith set is or is not, and regardless of what socially around you is the norm - think to yourself, what is something that at this particular time of year, feels like a way of coming back to yourself and coming home to your bones? And if you want to engage with us on Instagram @SnortandCackle, then feel free to maybe comment on this episode’s post or on any post really.

But more importantly for yourself, figure out what is one thing for yourself that feels like you've come home to your bones. And if you're a knit witch, then maybe that means that you sit back down to your needles after a summer away from them. If you are kitchen witch, maybe it's that you are taking a swig from an elderberry syrup that you made heading into cold and flu season. If you live somewhere really warm, maybe it's that you cook a specific meal at this time of year that is something that for whatever reason, you don't cook at a different time of year.

I invite you to think of those things and figure out at least one of those things and then do it! Engage with that thing that brings you home to your bones because I think we can always ... our bones appreciate it and we can always use a little bit more of that in our frequently ever quicker, fast-paced lives.

So yeah. Welcome to knit witch season. Welcome to season two. Thank you so much for joining me. And I look forward to sharing with you the rest of this season. It's going to be really great. I'm really excited for the conversations that we've got rolling out.

And alongside this episode, of course, the start of the season. So we've got two more episodes for you to binge right now for season two, you can also go back through and re-listen to, or listen for the first time to season one episodes in

your feed. And I'm really excited about where this season is going to go and the conversations that we're going to be having.

Yeah, and please do join us for Snort and Cackle book club, our book this season. It's going to be a good one. I'm excited. Thanks so much for listening.

[Upbeat music plays.] You can find full episode recordings and transcripts at snortandcackle.com. Just click on podcast in the main menu. Follow Snort and Cackle on Instagram @snortandcackle and join our seasonal book club with @SnortandCackleBookClub. Don't forget to subscribe and review the podcast by your favorite podcasting platform.

Editing provided by Noah Gilroy, recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.