If you plan on using a brine and you want a simple recipe that will make your turkey especially delicious, here you go...
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 gallon water or enough to completely cover the bird
Few peeled cloves of garlic
Sprigs of rosemary, sage & thyme
Dissolve salt in a cold or room temperature water, add the sugar and mix throughly.
Add the herbs.
Allow to set overnight in the fridge or in an ice chest cooler (with ice)
When ready to roast, remove the turkey and throughly rinse off all the brine.
That’s it.
We often talk about magic as something we bring to nature: a circle cast in the woods, a candle set beside an apple, words spoken over a bowl.
But walk outside in early November and notice who is already doing the work.
The leaves have let go without being asked.
Beneath them, fungi are threading through the dark, turning what has fallen into soil.
Seeds are sleeping in the cold ground, trusting a spring they cannot see.
Nothing here is performed. Nothing needs a spell to make it so.
This is the oldest magic we know: death becoming ground, and ground becoming food.
Every harvest we've ever eaten grew from something that came before it.
The cycle doesn't ask for belief. It simply turns.
Maybe that's why November feels so charged.
The Romans opened the mundus and felt the dead draw near. We light candles and say names.
But the threshold was never only in a ritual pit or a ceremony.
It's in the compost heap and the rotting log, in every place where an ending quietly becomes a beginning.
We don't think our practices create magic so much as help us pay attention to it.
The circle, the offering, the blessed meal: these are ways of saying I see you, and I'm part of this too.
So this week, try something small. Step outside at dusk. Touch the bark of a tree, or press your hand to cold soil.
Don't ask for anything.
Just notice that the magic was already here, and always has been.