Making December Magic! (Part 1)
Part 1: Remember & Review
Dear Readers,
Happy December! I am thrilled to begin sharing my end-of-year process with you. It is a process to review, reflect, and reclaim our stories of the past year, and renew, plant, and dream into the coming year.
It is one of my favorite times of year, and it is also hard, which I will surely write about in a later post. If this time of year is hard for you, I am with you, holding the joy and magic and grief together. This process is about making space for holding all of it.
I have been doing some iteration of this process for over a dozen years, and have been wanting to offer it in a community setting for a few years but haven’t found the time to make it happen. This year is the first year of Enchantable, and I realized this would be the perfect venue for it!
Initially, I was considering just offering this series to paid subscribers. Upon further reflection, it didn’t feel right, and I am committed to making my content accessible to everyone. Plus, I want to share it with all of you, and experience it with you. That said, if you benefit from this work and have the resources that would allow you to join at a paid subscription level, I invite you to upgrade your subcription, or even just share and invite others to subscribe who would enjoy and benefit from this work.
An introduction to my evolving process
(bow of gratitude to 2022 Steph who wrote this down :)
My process has morphed and evolved over time. Initially inspired by Chris Guillebeau´s annual review process, then infused with the spellcasting of adrienne maree brown, my own process has taken on a life of its own (I highly recommend looking at their processes for inspiration). My ritual and spellcasting work has also been deeply influenced by Chani Nicholas and the CHANI app (highly recommend!) and the Many Moons lunar planner by Sarah Faith Gottesteiner of the Moon Studio.
This process is a way to honor the seasonal cycles that we are a part of, to reclaim earth-based celebrations, and is a way of making magic and collaborating with the natural world and the cycles and energies around us. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, nature is going dark, and we can follow their lead and use the potent energy of the season to take stock of our life, where we’ve been and where we dream of going. If you are in the southern hemisphere, you can still use this process with the summer energies!
This process is also an invitation to really take stock of our lives, where we have been and where we would like to go. It invites us to carve out space during what can be a busy time to pause, remember, reflect, review, dream, and imagine. To release what we don’t want to carry forward. To name what we want to call in. To be intentional with our lives, and how we spend our precious energy and time. They are precious. Let’s make the most of them.
This is a magic-making process. It is about using the power of our reflection and dreaming, and the power of our words (which I believe are spells), to honor and release what we want to leave behind, celebrate our path and where we’ve been and what we’ve learned, and call forth with intention what we want to bring more of into our lives. It is also magic-making in collaboration with the power of natural cycles and energies and more-than-human and unseen realms. Quoting myself from earlier this year: “Spell work is magic, and magic is also doing the work that needs doing to make our dreams and spells come true.” Relatedly, quoting the late great Octavia Butler: “So be it! See to it!”
I usually begin the process in early December, culminating on the solstice, carrying it forward into the (Gregorian calendar) New Year. This gives me time to slowly reflect, percolate, remember, and deeply seed my dreams. But the whole process could also be done in a few hours of quiet. It is somewhat nonlinear, as I start the steps and circle around them, coming back again and again. The process includes steps such as reviewing, spellcasting, vision boarding, and choosing a word of the next year. I usually write the spell on the solstice, and complete the vision board on or around new year’s day, but you can do it in whatever time frame works for you (but I will be sending the content out in roughly the order that I do it in). I invite you on this journey with me, to take what resonates and leave the rest, to evolve it into your own process, and most of all, enjoy!
I will be offering this series in the steps as I do them. The process may even evolove this year as we go. We’ll make space for that emergence, together!
Part 1: Remember, Review, and Take Stock
The first part of the process is to remember, review, and take stock of the past year, witnessing our year in the rearview mirror. To review, we need to remember:
What happened?
What went well?
What didn’t?
What was fun? Hard? Challenging?
What accomplishments are you proud of?
What needs to be celebrated?
Inspired by my I shared a few weeks ago, I would like to take you on a little guided journey to remember your year!
Start with a moment of quiet intention for the whole process. Perhaps just a few breaths and intention for this whole process between now and January. This is the beginning, and beginnings and endings are important. Honor the beginning with a few breaths, maybe lighting a candle or some incense, and some simple words, like:
I honor this past year, and all the ways I have shown up and been.
I open my heart to all that is possible for the next year, beyond my wildest dreams.With the recording from my end-of-semester reflection exercise (using January as your point of reference instead of the start of the semester) or on your own, take yourself through a journey of the year. Before looking at your calendars or planners, take yourself back to January 1, 2023. Remember yourself on this day, where you were, what you were wearing, what you were doing, how you felt, if you can remember. Then slowly trace your journey through the year with your mind. What do you remember? What stands out? Write it down, take note. It can be fun to do this before you look at your planners and calendars, to see what stands out from memory without the aid of your notes.
Go back through calendars (physical, electronic, planners) and other ways you document your life (such as social media posts, etc.). Make a list of notable events and occurrences (here is a template to get you started). In this part, it is particularly fun and interesting to notice what you didn’t remember in step 1. Oh yeah, that happened!
If you have done this process previously (if you set goals or intentions for 2023), take a look at last year’s document, especially the goals, aspirations and dreams for the current year, and see what came to fruition, what went beyond your wildest expectations, what didn’t happen that you want to carry forward to next year, and what didn’t happen that you are ready to let go of.
I like to look at the year categorically, and make a list of significant occurances in each catetory, such as:
major milestones (graduated! had a baby! started a new job! left a terrible job! left a relationship! started a new relationship! etc.)
health, healing, well-being
love, family, friends, relationships
travel
spirituality
learning (personal/professional development, studies, training, etc.)
teaching (classes I caught, courses I developed, etc.)
publications (things I wrote and put out into the world)
new connections/friendships
work
fun
other blessings/gifts/accomplishements
I encourage you to use the categories that make the most sense for you (or let go of categories completely if they are not helpful). The categories might even change over time. Your categories will be different depending on what is important to you, how you spend your time and energy, etc. Think about these categories very broadly in terms of what went well (accomplishments, goals achieved, highlights) and what didn't (what was hard, challenging, disappointing, draining; what goals were left unmet, failures1).
My 2022 pie chart review You could make this as a list, or visualize it in another way such as a pie chart (see above). Last year, I started with a list but really felt a yearning to visualize it another way and ended up with a pie chart, too. You can create the chart based on your own categories, and make pie slices that are reflective of the importance of each slice (or the time and space it takes up in your life). Year to year, different categories might take up different amounts of space.
Most importantly, enjoy the process! There will be separate posts on gratitude and celebration, but both of these are
I wrote out this guide for you before starting my own 2023 review process. So far, my own process looked like this:
I started by sitting at the computer with a GoogleDoc and just brainstorming everything that I remembered about the year. This was somewhat chronologically but ended up ping-ponging across the year. I didn’t use categories to start - I just brainstormed.
I then scrolled back through my calendar (GoogleCal), planners (I use two - The Many Moons Lunar Planner and CHANI) and social media accounts to see what I had missed/forgotten about and what stood out (there was a lot!).
My list was a mess! A beautiful mess, but a mess nonetheless. I started to group things into categories that mades sense, which pretty closely mirror the ones above.
Stay tuned for the rest of the series, coming to you over the course of this month! The next post will share some freewriting prompts for the next step, Reflect and Release. And please keep me posted on any reflections on your process. I would love to hear how it is going for you in the comments below (or send me a message!). I will be sending you updates as I go through my own process, too.
I will send us off with a blessing for this process:
May our reflection be a site of learning and growth.
May our dreams be realized.
May the beauty of our hearts’ deepest longings contribute to a world grounded in collective care, liberation, justice, peace, beauty, and love,
With gratitude for the chance to see the turning of another year, and to live even more fully into our dreams, to become ever more fully ourselves.
Enjoy the process!
With love,
Stephanie
Meet your “failures” or “rejections” with a lot of self-compassion. For more on this, I recommend checking out my post on turning rejection into a work of art.