Oranges: Unpeeling the Wonders of This Citrus Delight

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Witch-a-licious newsletter! This newsletter started as a collaboration between Haylee and myself, Sheetal, born out of our desire to deepen our understanding of witchcraft, write our grimoires, and view the world through a magical lens. Our goal is to carve out time to explore these realms and build a community around the magic we discover and create.

This newsletter began as a small seed of an idea, and even before this first issue was sent out, it grew into something more significant. It became clear that many around us share our curiosity and eagerness to learn and connect through magical practices. 

What is even more exciting is the open invitation to join in the community of Witches Botanica! Each month, we’ll send a newsletter filled with personal stories and discoveries from various folks in the community about a plant we explored over the last moon cycle. We’ll also reveal the next plant we’ll be diving into! If this made your fingers tingle, and sparked a little fire in your heart - we would love to have you. Email us and let us know you want to join our discord - to stay in touch , share your own plant adventures, hop into a virtual circle to connect with others, or come hang with us at an in-person workshop. You can find us in New York, Seattle, Atlanta, and India right now—let’s grow together! 

What to Expect Each Month:

• Focus Plant/Herb/Fruit: We’ll select a plant, herb, or fruit to explore deeply.

• Community Connection: Everyone is encouraged to research, experiment with, and incorporate the monthly selection into their magic.

• Monthly Catch-up Call: We’ll have a virtual meeting to share our findings and experiences.

• Contributions Welcome: Feel encouraged to write about your journey or create entries for your grimoire to be featured in the newsletter.

This Month's Magic: Oranges

Next Month’s magic: Chamomile

Oranges & their Magic

Who knew oranges were so cool?! There are so many varieties of oranges, so many magical uses, and so much cultural significance to them! To get all the details - you can check out my grimoire - linked here! Let’s dive into all the different ways we worked with oranges:

Sheetal’s Reflections:

December is always a weird month for me - there is so much activity, the feeling of the ending of a year and the preparation of a new one. It’s my birthday, it's the holiday season, and the new year is right around the corner. It often feels like a time of introspection and not a time for celebration; and this year I want to change that! I have some major crossroads coming up in my life and these are my personal goals for the next year:

1. I want to be more comfortable taking up space and being authentically me. For me, a lot of this is related to speaking my truth, finding and having my voice. To be fully, wholly, nakedly me - I need the space and time to get in touch with my intuition and my emotions. The question that keeps coming back: How can you be vulnerable if you don’t even know how you feel? 

2. I want to tap into my flow, my chi, my prana, my sensuality and my magic. I love to plan - I want things in my schedule (some of which are changeable if the need arises!). I want to find a way to balance my inner planner with my inner flow-er. 

3. I am feeling very much in my mama energy. I want to teach, to love, to nurture. I wonder how this maps out when you don’t have children and I am wondering where to place this, how to use this energy. It’s scary. I hope to find out these answers in the next year. 

Dealing with all these big topics felt really heavy in my body and I was desiring to feel lighter and to carve out space for myself every day.  Oranges felt like the perfect way to help with the feeling of light, fresh and comforting in an energetic way. 

The healing properties of oranges on page 3 of my research for my grimoire felt very aligned with what I needed and wanted to create a salad that could make me feel a lot of self love:

Orange and Arugula self love magic salad: 

Ingredients:

Arugula

Segmented honey tangerines

Flaked parmesan

Powdered pistachios

Kalamata olives

Dressing:

Juice from the honey tangerines 

fern/dill olive oil (from saratoga olive oils)

Cranberry pear balsamic vinegar (from saratoga olive oils)

Gochugaru chilli flakes

Himalayan Pink salt

How it went: 

I committed to doing the morning routine (shower, do my hair) and entering my altar every day for a month. I committed to spending 20 min to make my self care salad every day for a week, but actually did it consistently for 2 weeks till I ran out of ingredients.

Food has always been one of my love languages and having this salad served up in one of my most beautiful bowls every day made me feel so loved, cared for.

After a month - this definitely put me into my goddess era. I feel beautiful from the inside out. I felt grateful. I felt happy.  I felt stronger. I felt more in touch with my sensuality. 

I want to add a self care salad (even with other ingredients) every day. It’s hard to stay consistent but maybe, maybe there is some kind of spell that magic can put on me to help me with that! 

Haylee’s Reflections:

Through intentional seasonal living I have built a relationship with many different foods, herbs, tarot, deities, flowers (you get the idea). Along the journey I have met some incredible people desiring to tap into their witchy, embodied and thriving self. This journey can feel lonely - it has been co-opted to feel like an individual pursuit that requires copious amounts of solitude and “healing” until you are “healed” and can rejoin the masses. I reject that! All the signs in my life (and even the science behind our “social brain”) point to the importance of being together in community as we navigate this wild world. Of course that means quiet reflection time alone, but it also means grappling, celebrating and discovering together! 

For this reason, and so many more, Healing Haylee, Ribbon Roads Wellness, Ecosapiens - however you met me - is transforming to be a part of Witches Botanica! I will still be offering 1:1 Seasonal Wellness Coaching on a limited basis, and may even start up a virtual cohort in the future. 

Inner Child Orange Spell, you can edit this if you want

Oranges are bright, bold, and powerful. They energize and reinvigorate, almost as if they carry the warmth of the sun into the cold of winter. A few years ago, I baked orange slices for winter decor. Their vibrant color and festive aroma transformed the season for me, and now, that scent always reminds me of winter's coziness. Later, I learned that oranges are actually in season during January in Florida—a beautiful bonus for the winter months. It feels almost magical, as if oranges know we need their brightness in the colder days, a natural response to our globally connected world.

Recently, I experimented with creating an orange-infused face mist to enhance my morning affirmations. I zested an orange and placed it in water by the window, thinking of it as a sort of herbal essence. I imagined the moonlight lending its energy to the infusion overnight. Unfortunately, the next morning I found 2 dead bugs floating in it. Oh, well, we are experimenting here! It doesn’t always go as planned. The true gift of the exploration was really peeling the orange. It wasn’t easy, and it reminded me of the work it takes to release the protections we no longer need. Orange peels, after all, are highly nutritive, but they’re also bitter. Energetically, too much boundary and isolation can make us bitter if we hold on to it for too long.

This sparked an idea for a little spell: as you peel an orange, say aloud one thing that you are holding onto that is no longer needed for protection. Then, as you savor the bright, juicy fruit, think of it as a sweet gift to your inner child—a moment of joy and lightness after the work of letting go.

Jess’s Reflections:

As I embark on this journey, my goal is to remember what was told to me and to explore what my people and other nations know about nature and how we’re enter-connected. “You have a headache?” “Make some tea out of this leaf” “have a stomach ache” “this is good for it” “dreams of this” “good omen”.

Being from Haiti, the word witchcraft was always danced around, and even a taboo. It may be because of the first definition of the word, “the practice of magic, especially for evil purposes; the use of spells”, another more modern definition is “religious practice involving magic and affinity with nature”. This new stage of my life has been supporting the latter definition, while helping reshape my view of the word and giving me more and more experiences to prove that there is plenty of magic in my life, especially with a new calling to find how I connect with nature and it’s many gifts. As I made peace with that it’s interesting how many anecdotes and memories flooded back to mind. Here are a few of my experiences with oranges.

In Haiti, we mostly use Sweet Orange and Sour Oranges. We find ways to put every part of the tree and its fruit. The leaves are used for healing calming baths, infusions are made with the flower to help you sleep, we eat or make juice out of the flesh, the skin is used either for jam, or remedies. My first memory is of having a high fever and getting bathe with orange leaves water. I remember my brother boiling orange peels to feel his home with the sweet aroma and ward off even spirits.

I was so overzealous I went ahead and just bought some navel oranges, peeled them, boiled the skin but my home was not filled with sweet aromas. This is the beauty of exploring, you get to learn what works and what doesn’t, perhaps some sweet oranges might have been more fragrant. I went on to use that water in my hair washing regimen, after shampooing it is said that orange water will leave you hair soft and smelling nice, my locs did feel quite supple after said wash. 

In Haitian culture dreams are often telling of what’s to come and your spiritual life. Dreaming of oranges in general are real aged to blessings, except in 2 cases, when they are dry or rotten. Dreaming of a tree full of oranges or that you are picking oranges signifies that the tide are about to turn in your favor, it means you are in your season of impact. If you dream of reaching an orange as a gift signifies that a door will open for you, a blessing is coming into your life. If you dream you  are the one gifting an orange, it means you are being called to give more or do an act of service. To dream that you are gifted many oranges means you are about to see a profit, or that you will gain healing from sickness. If you dream of a tree that has no oranges, it signifies that it’s about to be a meager season. If you dream of dried or rotten oranges it signifies hard times ahead, it also calls for an evaluation of one’s life and to make some adjustment.

A little fun anecdote to end, growing up oranges were consumed to welcome the new year, the seeds in the oranges were meant to signify abundance. I’m trying to keep with that tradition, one year I went ahead and bought some oranges, but I mistakenly picked up seedless oranges. In following our intuition we proceeded to cutting them and eating on new years’ Eve, to our surprise every orange that was consumed had some seeds in there, this felt like a big wink from the universe, telling us that despite the odds things do work out in the end.

Shreya’s Reflections:

I recently experimented with orange peels to create natural, eco-friendly dyed paper, and it was magical! After simmering the peels in water for a rich dye, I soaked handmade paper in the warm, citrus-infused bath. I added a pinch of turmeric for a golden glow, which deepened the earthy tones beautifully. Crumpling the paper beforehand adds stunning, textured patterns (in case you’d like to try that). Once dried, the paper carried a faint citrus aroma and was perfect for journaling and gift-wrapping. It’s a simple, sustainable craft that transforms kitchen waste into something artistic and meaningful. Try it—your creativity (and the planet) will thank you!

Conclusion:

Turns out there is enough magic in oranges to have so many applications! Do you have any special interactions with oranges? Any special stories to share? Any magical secrets, family recipes or a unique way to use them? We would love to hear!!!

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