The Transmutation of the Old Year to the New Year | A Christian Witch's Christmas
- Sara Raztresen
- Dec 10, 2025
- 8 min read
You'd think Christians would want to approach God, not run from Him.
(Psst, hey! Did you know? This blog was originally a Patreon post, and if you join me on Patreon on the Queen or King tiers, then not only do you get all my YouTube videos ad-free and two weeks early, but you also get special write-ups, magical tips, updates, and whole spells. Consider subscribing to my Patreon to start your 2026 with even more good magical content!)
Alright, so, while we haven't exactly buried 2025 yet, it is good to start thinking about it, because this calendar year is officially on hospice. We got 30 days left, counting today, and before we know it, we'll all be messing up our every document when we write 2025 on it instead of 2026.
(Or, if you're like me, you'll finally be on pace... because it's been 2026 in my mind already lol.)
Anyway, the fun thing about liturgy as I've gotten deeper into it and started appreciating it more, is the fact that it is a cycle. Specifically, it's a cycle that follows the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ—and that's a cycle that we see happen not only in the year, but in smaller moments, too, like that weird week between Christmas and New Year's, or just in the switch of Old Year to New Year overall.
What I mean is this: just like we have that crazy march leading up to Easter, with the whole passion story, then Good Friday and that weird, liminal Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, so too do we see our yearly cycle going to sleep/death and waking up again in those couple weeks or so after Christmas. That liminal space comes back as Jesus is born (thus basically breaking the bonds of cold, dark, and death, much the same way that the Sun would be "reborn" in pre-Christian mythos), and then the yearly pulse itself is renewed after that strange "slumber" that feels a lot like the three days Jesus spent down in the underworld, running around and waking up the Saints. Come New Year's, and it's like Easter Sunday, but for the calendar rather than Christ.
And you know what this cycle is called in the liturgical calendar/in folk religion and cultural custom? The twelve days of Christmas!
(Yes, it's more than just a Christmas song!)
The Twelve Days of Christmas Explained
So, the Twelve Days of Christmas is the time between December 25th and January 6th (Epiphany). Turns out there's a lot of specifically English sociopolitical and cultural/religious strife mixed into this idea, as during the Tudor era, what with all the Protestant (Anglican)/Catholic schism, suddenly, being Catholic was really dicey. It's funny that this is coming up now, especially after I picked up a copy of the Book of Oberon (an Elizabethan era grimoire full of all kinds of Christian occult magic), but basically, as the Catholics had to try and move in secret among this tumultous time, they actually hid their Catholic heritage and spiritual meanings in that famous "Twelve Days of Christmas" song. Dynamic Catholic has a whole page explaining the significance of each line of that song in Catholic symbolism, which is pretty cool!
More than that, though, the Twelve Days of Christmas is also important because a lot of Saint feasts and other important moments happen between there, like the Feast of St. Stephen (December 26th), Feast of St. John (December 27th), Childermas or Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dececmber 28th), and eventually, Twelfth Night (January 5th). English Heritage explains more about each day, but we see a lot of fun traditions here, like wassailing on St. John's feast and making little fruit cakes for Twelfth Night!
And even more fun still are the pre-Christian notions behind this time. During and after Yule, or Jol, it was a time not only for Germanic/Norse peoples to worship their gods, but to also be careful, because the wacky, wild spirits were out and about for one last hurrah before the sun grew too strong. For these northern peoples, this was commonly called the Wild Hunt, and it was when gods like Odin or Wodan (or other figures, depending on the time period) would rush through the lands in a great fury. However, according to the Grimm brothers, it might not have always been a scary thing; there may very well have been a situational time, where the direction and behavior of the spirits in the Wild Hunt could signify good or bad things to come. Nonetheless, the point stood: this was a spooky time, where the spirits were at their most mischievous, where chaos was great.
In Slavic cultures, too, this was the time of the underworld spirits. While the sun (and the sun god, either Dazhbog or Kresnik or whoever depending on the region) were at their weakest, all those underworld spirits who otherwise couldn't handle the full brunt of the sun were out and doing their thing with all they had, and so it was easy to get caught up in a shit mess if you were out messing around while they had free reign of the place. It's not that these spirits were evil, per se, but they certainly weren't always benevolent. This is the time of the gods of cold, death, and darkness, like Veles and Morana/Mara, and just like we celebrate our great strength in summer as people of the light, so do the people of the dark get extra boisterous around this time (though they try their tricks in the summer during Ivana Kupala, too)!
So there's a lot of fun to be had during this time, for many reasons. One reason for me, though, will be killing and resting this year, so that it can transmute and be reborn into the New Year.
Why Death and Rebirth of the Year is Good to Observe
Now, this might feel like a no brainer, but let's be real: in this hubbub of holiday mess, it's easy to get sucked into a rhythm and not pause to think about why we're in the rhythm, y'know? I know that for me, I want to be more intentional with it this year especially, because 2025 has just been... a bag of ass, if I'm being real.
The news cycles. The travesties. The economic disaster. The general grumpiness that such heaviness has put on people. It's time to bury all that and compost it!
And if any of y'all follow me on TikTok especially, then you'll know that sometimes I post my own witchy tips there, and that this here is a big one: the visual aspect of magic. Say it with me again: we are composting 2025 so that 2026 can be better. Just like in the garden, when we take the scraps of the food we've eaten and put them back into the earth to break down and decompose, we can then use that sludgy, slimy, rotten mass in our new soil so that the next plants we grow have yet more nutrients to use to grow the next year's fruits. That process of these peels, rinds, leaves, roots, carrot tops, and anything else losing their original shape and becoming the food of new plants is a great visual to hold onto as we imagine this magic, because we're taking 2025 and doing the same thing: we're breaking it down from its original shape, and all the horrors in it, and we're returning it to the unformed ether, where its shape and purpose are no longer decided, and where all the energy it once carried can be cleansed by our own spiritual soil and repurposed to grow new fruits.
It's a great way to acknowledge what was, just as we acknowledge those banana peels and apple cores we throw into the compost bin, and a great way to signify our intention of what's to come as we bury those things and let them break down to become new matter. In this case, we're asking God to do one of the many things He does so well: alchemize. Just like the worms and grubs and fungi He made, He, too, can take old things, discard their shell, and extract that raw energy to be made clean and brought forward once more.
This can look however you want it to look in a ritual, y'know? What matters in the ritual is that the visual you're setting up matches how you understand that energy shifting and changing. This means your ritual can look like anything, and use any metaphor that makes sense to you, so get creative with it! Some ideas for metaphors include:
Funeral and Birth
The Plant Cycle (Seed, Leaf, Flower, Fruit, Seed)
Composting (Scraps to Fertilizer to Fruit)
Jesus's Death and Ressurection
The Phoenix
For me, I think I'll be making my own 12 Days of Christmas something of a journey across bridge, or a country border. After all, it spans from 2025 into 2026, so it makes sense to me that there should be some kind of border or connection between the two, or a veil we might pass through. This means my 12 days will look like burying/banishing 2025 on Christmas day, like a town gone up in a blaze of Holy Fire when the Light of the World (Christ) returns, and making the "journey" from 2025 to 2026 up to the City of Epiphany, a new city in which I'll live until the cycle begins again. It also means treating it like a do-over: if this is my metaphor, of destruction and taking refuge in a new "land," then it means I'll be leaving things behind in the blaze. There are many parts of 2025 I do not want to take with me into 2026, and many parts that the Holy Fire no doubt will have taken from me, swallowing and burning them to ash that I can't hold onto and have to wash off me (as I can't walk around ash-stained and smoky).
Is this a morbid image? Mayhaps. But it does mean that the physical ritual will look something like writing down all these things I'm losing, as well as asking God what He's taking from me, too (because when something like a fire happens, it's not like you're ready for it, nor is it something where you only conveniently lose what you're ready to part with). God may very well be reaping something, too, tearing something down in my life, and all of those thing will go in the Holy Fire (written on a piece of paper and burned), and will be washed off with Holy Water as I journey forward, before I finally find shelter under the Star of my God's guidance during Epiphany, as the Three Kings did. After this Christmas Day ritual, the next 12 days will be spent reflecting, purging (via fasting, meditation, and absolution), and then rejoicing in a new place of refuge, officially parting with 2025 completely and beginning anew in 2026.
(Kinda lines up with the themes of the 12 days, too, all things considered! That Feast of Holy Innocents is... no joke.)
But what do y'all think? How are you planning to transmute and compost your 2025? What things do you want to let go of, and what things do you want to grow in the new year? ♥
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
Comments