The year my daughter was born, something in me shifted.

Not just in the hormonal, heart-opening, soul-recalibrating way that all new parents experience…although that was certainly part of it.

This shift was more specific. It was December, and we were about to celebrate our first holiday season with this itty-bitty bundle of soft, melty sweetness wrapped in blankets. I remember looking around at all the holiday hustle and bustle and feeling a nagging sense of disconnection with it all. A whisper inside me kept saying: This isn’t it. This isn’t the magic that I want to share with my daughter.

The plastic tinsel, factory-made ornaments, frantic shopping, sugar-fueled stress, and tangled strands of LED lights all felt so…hollow…and performative.

I felt like the world was mindlessly participating in a strange pageant that had long since lost its meaning.

I remember thinking, “How can I create real magic and deeper meaning during the holidays for our family?” And then, out of the blue, I was introduced to the 13 Sacred Nights practice. It was the answer to my yearning for something deeper, more real and more meaningful—a practice inviting our souls to dive into the sacred stillness and radiant darkness of deep winter, where true magic is free to unfold.

As the years passed and my daughter grew from toddler to young child, I continued to wrestle with the hyper-commercialization of our holidays. But another mainstream holiday norm began to really bother me: the ritualized lying to our children.

You know how it goes…

It starts innocently enough, with “jolly-old” Saint Nick. We tell them Santa is real, that his reindeer fly, that he sees them when they’re sleeping and somehow slips down our (often nonexistent) chimneys to drop off toys. And then, when they’re older, we have to break the spell. “Sweetheart… Santa isn’t real.” It’s a universally accepted rite of passage in Western parenting.

But have we ever stopped to think about how bizarre it is?

We cultivate wonder, belief and trust in our children, only to pull the rug out from under them. When our “playful” deception is revealed, a subtle but significant fracture happens. Not only is their belief in Santa broken, but so is their belief in us—the parents who told them magic was real, and then, it wasn’t.

Some well-meaning moms along the way tried to convince me that this was good, that myth-making around Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny “teaches kids to believe in the unseen.” I wanted to believe that, and I tried to, but in the end, it didn’t ring true for me. Because when our kids find out those stories aren’t true, that it was all pretend, and that the grown-ups were all in on it… their openness to the existence of real magic often gets thrown out with the jolly man in red, the fairy with an oddly intense interest in teeth, and the bunny who lays eggs. They don’t just lose Santa and his elves, they start to lose their openness to the invisible world of energy, intuition, and the greater mystery. The unseen becomes suspect, or worse, dismissed. That loss is a tragedy, because true magic is absolutely real and alive, and it doesn’t involve a round man in red sliding down the chimney or a giant rabbit hiding candy in the yard.

Real magic is found in our connection with the Divine, the unfathomable order of the cosmos, the fractal nature of reality and the unseen realms that border and overlap with this human experience.

The 13 Sacred Nights practice gave me a completely different way to experience real magic with my daughter during the holidays. Not a fiction or fabrication, but a ritual rooted in the rhythms of nature, the patterns of the cosmos and our connection with the Divine. This ritual begins on the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, when everything in nature has slowed down and is conserving energy. Trees stand silent and bare, having dropped their leaves, and animals hibernate. Even the seeds go underground. Each of the 13 Sacred Nights that follow corresponds to a month in the year ahead with one exception: the first night holds an overarching vision for the entire coming year. Through reflection, journaling, and drawing oracle cards, we listen, receive, replenish, reset and dream forward the year to come.

The real magic is found in the darkness, the stillness, the diving inward.

And yes, children can do it too! They light candles, draw oracle cards, notice signs in nature, pay more attention to their dreams and learn to trust their own inner knowing. What they are practicing and learning isn’t make-believe. It’s a lived experience of their own creative power, the wisdom of nature, and the guidance that comes through synchronicity. They are learning to sense the invisible web of energy that surrounds and informs us. They are learning to tune into their relationship with that something greater.

The ritual of the 13 Sacred Nights is both a sweet and delightful winter tradition and also a profoundly powerful practice. It reminds us (and our children) that we have access to inner wisdom and unseen support; that our dreams, when planted in the fertile soil of stillness have power; and that we are not passive recipients of life, but co-creators of it. The practice invites us to align with nature’s rhythms, to listen to the quiet voice within and to pay attention to the subtle messages around us. The 13 Sacred Nights practice teaches us to walk through life awake to the magic and mystery that are unfolding all around us, within us and through us… always. It is a framework for magic that we don’t age out of… because it is not “make-believe”; it is real.

I don’t miss Santa.

My daughter doesn’t either.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve thrown all the mainstream traditions out. We still have our Christmas tree, decorated with years of cherished ornaments, many passed down from my grandmother, and each with its own little story. We still gather with extended family, share food, and give gifts. We still show up for the season, but we show up differently now. The fuss and frantic momentum have all faded into the background. As the colder weather and longer nights approach, the 13 Sacred Nights is what we look forward to most, and with it, the opportunity to rest, reset and co-create.

While the world swirls around us in flashing lights, sugar binges, and sales signs, we share an inner glow, as if carrying around a sacred little secret in our pocket. We’re soaking in the quiet awareness of a deeper presence.

This is our holiday tradition now. And the magic? It’s never been more real.