Overview
- Guides published this week outline the season as typically running from December 25 to January 6, with some regions beginning at the winter solstice on December 21.
- Practical advice centers on preparing the home and smudging rooms in sequence—often starting in the kitchen and moving clockwise—with the custom historically extending to stables.
- Reported recommendations favor local herbs and resins such as sage, mugwort, juniper, angelica root, and spruce resin, with claimed purifying and strengthening effects and no need for exotic incense.
- The revived “13 wishes” ritual involves writing thirteen wishes, burning one on each of twelve nights, and keeping the remaining note as a personal responsibility.
- Coverage recalls long‑standing taboos like not hanging laundry and avoiding hair or nail cutting, and it flags the tradition’s appropriation by National Socialists as a cautionary historical context.