Witch’s Almanac — 22nd November 2025: The Day of the Turning Winds

“The wind remembers what the earth forgets.”

The Day of the Turning Winds arrives softly, without ritual or proclamation, and yet in the old Irish Craft it was treated with the reverence of a threshold feast. The 22nd of November sits in the deep hush after Samhain’s fading glow, when the year’s breath changes direction and the world turns its face fully toward winter. It is a day recognised not in calendars, but in the air itself — in the subtle shift of pressure, the altered song of branches, the way the body seems to know something new has begun.

The old people in Ireland had quiet ways of marking this day. Some simply called it “the shift,” or “the turning of the wind,” noting that the land often changed its breath around the 22nd of November. It marked the moment the year slipped past harvest’s memory and into the dreaming dark, when the witch was asked to wake her senses and listen not just with the ears, but with the skin, the bones, the breath. For the wind is the first omen of winter, and winter’s teaching begins here. 

On this day, the wise ones stepped outside not to divine, but to perceive. They felt the air as a messenger, a shapeshifter, a keeper of seasonal intention. Whatever direction the wind turned on this day, the winter would follow. A soft southern flow carried warmth and rest; a cutting northern current signalled a season of discipline and inner fortification. A still day was the rarest sign of all, as though the land drew a single deep breath before settling into its long night of dreaming.

To the trained witch, this was not superstition — it was communion.

The Mythic Winds of Ireland

In Irish lore, the wind was not merely weather. It was a presence, a memory, a herald of the unseen. The ancient people saw wind as the breath of the land itself, a voice carried from hill to sea, from sídhe-mound to boundary wall. Because of this, many witches believed that when the wind turned, the Otherworld opened a little wider.

Some said the north wind came from the Cailleach’s cloak, shaken over mountains to bring frost and clarity. Others whispered that the warm wind from the southwest carried the breath of ancient spirits who tended the deep wells beneath the earth. A sudden gust at dusk was a message from the Aos Sí, shifting unseen across the land. And the rare stillness — the breathless pause — was believed to be the moment when the worlds touched, and even the land held its breath in reverence.

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