When Ancestral Practice Doesn't Feel Like You Expected

It has been a while since I've written here. I lost my momentum for a time, and if I'm being completely honest, part of the reason was that I became a little disheartened.

We can study the history of ancient and ancestral traditions. We can read everything we can find about Germanic and Anglo-Saxon beliefs, folklore, customs, and the things our ancestors may have done. We can try to recreate those practices in our own homes. But at the end of the day, we cannot experience those traditions exactly as they did. And sometimes, despite all that effort, you just don't feel anything.

That can be difficult to admit. You can perform the rituals, try old charms, make offerings, bake with ingredients you've grown yourself, dry herbs from your own garden, and celebrate the changing seasons. You can do everything you think you're supposed to be doing and still wonder, Why don't I feel more connected to this?

I've struggled with that myself.

Why Reconstructing the Past Can Only Take Us So Far

One thing that has helped me is realizing just how incomplete our picture of pre-Christian Germanic life actually is. This isn't a tradition where an ancient handbook survived telling us exactly what an ordinary family did throughout the year.

For the pagan Anglo-Saxons in particular, the problem is significant. English Heritage notes that there are no surviving contemporary written sources describing their early pagan religious practices. What we know has to be pieced together from archaeology, later writings, place names, language, burial practices, and comparisons with related Germanic cultures. Christianity began spreading among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from the late sixth century onward, meaning much of the written record we do have comes from a society that was already becoming Christian.

That doesn't make reconstruction pointless. Quite the opposite. I find it fascinating to learn what we can know. But it does mean we should be careful about expecting historical research to hand us a complete spiritual life.

Archaeology has similar limitations. A burial, an object placed in water, or the remains of a particular site can tell us that an action occurred, but interpreting exactly what it meant to the people who performed it is much harder. Historians sometimes have to make informed interpretations from the physical evidence rather than having someone's explanation of why a particular ritual mattered.

And perhaps that helps explain why following a reconstructed ritual perfectly can sometimes leave us feeling strangely disconnected. We may know pieces of what people did without possessing the lifetime of stories, family habits, language, relationships, landscape, and cultural understanding that once made those actions meaningful.

History can give us a foundation. It cannot give us someone else's lived experience.

Making It Our Own

There isn't going to be one book that tells us exactly what to do, and there isn't a website that can do it either, including mine. I hope the things I write here can help you learn about what our ancestors believed and practiced because research absolutely has a place in all of this. But no article can give you an A, B, C set of instructions that suddenly makes an ancestral practice meaningful to you.

At some point, we have to make it our own.

That might mean looking beyond documented ancient practices and thinking about the things you learned growing up. What traditions did your family have? What superstitions did you hear? What foods appeared every year at certain holidays? What did your grandparents grow in their gardens? What sayings did the adults around you repeat? What stories fascinated you as a child?

Those things may not fit neatly into a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon or Germanic practice, but they are still part of the story that brought you here.

And if you don't have many family traditions to draw from, you aren't alone.

Remember the Fanciful Part of Yourself

One thing I've been trying to do is spend more time in nature and remember what inspired me when I was little. I loved heroic stories and mythology. Thor fascinated me, but so did the stories of the Greek and Roman pantheons. There was something exciting about imagining a world in which the things happening around us had stories behind them.

Growing up inevitably changes the way we see those things. We know what causes lightning and thunder. We understand weather patterns and seasons. We don't need mythology to explain the mechanics of the natural world anymore.

But knowing the scientific explanation doesn't mean we have to stop experiencing nature through story and imagination.

When a thunderstorm rolls in, there is nothing wrong with letting it remind you of Thor. When everything in the house seems determined to go wrong in the same afternoon, perhaps you jokingly decide that some mischievous little household spirit has moved in and needs either banishing or appeasing. It doesn't require abandoning reason. It simply means allowing myth, folklore, symbolism, and a little childhood wonder to have a place alongside it.

Our ancestors lived in worlds filled with stories. Their landscapes had meaning. Places, seasons, weather, animals, plants, ancestors, gods, and unseen beings could all become part of the way people understood their surroundings.

Perhaps reconnecting with an older way of experiencing the world requires more than researching it. Perhaps sometimes we have to allow ourselves to become fanciful again.

Build a Practice Around the Life You Actually Have

Ultimately, I believe the point of all of this is for the practice to serve you and your family. It needs to make sense inside your actual household rather than becoming a performance of what you think an ancestral practice is supposed to look like.

Research the things that fascinate you. Learn about old customs. Read the mythology. Study folklore, historical foods, plants, herbs, seasonal practices, archaeological discoveries, and the beliefs we have evidence for. Then ask yourself which of those things genuinely belongs in your life.

You might also start much closer to home.

What foods already mean comfort or celebration to your family? Is there somewhere outdoors that you return to every season? Is there something you always do when the first cold weather arrives? Do you light candles during winter evenings? Grow certain plants every spring? Cook a particular meal on someone's birthday? Tell the same family stories every Christmas?

Tradition doesn't necessarily have to arrive with an ancient name attached to it.

You can also deliberately begin something new. Choose a meal your family makes on the first cool weekend of autumn. Take the children into nature on the same day every spring. Create a household ritual for welcoming winter. Grow an herb that you harvest together each year. Tell a particular myth around a fire. Keep photographs or write down the stories behind these things so the children understand why your family does them.

Repeat something long enough, and eventually nobody has to consult a book to know what comes next.

What Happens When the Chain Has Been Broken?

This part is especially personal for me. I had a grandmother from Germany whom I unfortunately never had the opportunity to meet. Because of that, I don't know all the little things she might have known growing up. I don't know what she learned from her parents or grandparents, or what they learned from the generations before them.

There are pieces of that inheritance that I simply don't have.

I think many people, particularly those of us whose families have moved across countries and generations, understand that feeling. Families relocate. Languages disappear. People assimilate. Sometimes customs aren't passed down because they seem ordinary and nobody realizes that a grandchild will desperately wish someone had thought to write them down.

And yet we still yearn for connection.

Maybe the answer isn't to spend our lives mourning everything we didn't inherit. Maybe we start unpacking what we do have. Look at your family, your childhood, the place where you live now, the stories that capture your imagination, and the things that make you feel connected to nature and home.

And where there are empty spaces, decide what you want to put there.

Ask yourself: What do I want my children to remember about growing up in our home? What do I want my grandchildren to say our family always did? What foods do I want them to associate with a particular season? What stories do I want them to know? What little ritual might someday make them think of home?

Because every old family tradition had to be new once.

Someone did something for the first time. Someone did it again. Their children remembered it, and perhaps their grandchildren eventually did it too. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being something a person had decided to do and became simply what our family does.

I'm Still Figuring It Out

I'd love to finish this by telling you that I've figured out exactly what my own practice should look like. I haven't. I'm still learning, experimenting, and figuring out what feels meaningful and what doesn't.

In fact, one of the reasons I originally started Hearthblossom was to push myself in that direction. Writing gave me a reason to research, learn, try things, and hopefully grow along my own path. Somewhere along the way I put pressure on myself to have answers when perhaps the entire point was to keep asking questions.

So maybe this is where I begin again.

Not with the expectation that I can perfectly recreate the beliefs or daily lives of people who lived a thousand years ago, but with the hope that I can learn from what they left behind while creating something meaningful for the family living in my home today.

We spend so much time searching backward for ancestral traditions that it's easy to forget something rather wonderful.

Someday, we will be the ancestors.

And perhaps some of the traditions our descendants treasure will be the ones we choose to begin today.

Sometimes the best way to find connection is simply to begin. Explore more ideas for bringing nature, tradition, and a little everyday magic into your own home.

There’s No Right or Wrong Way to Be a Witch

Rooted in the Old Ways: My Journey Back to Nature

Raising Children as a Witch: Nurturing Magic, Intention, and Kindness