Before TikTok witches. Before Etsy spell jars. Before “witchtok girlies” were selling moon water in aesthetic glass bottles.

There were millennial girls raised on magic.

Girls who grew up watching Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, Halloweentown, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Twitches, and most importantly…Charmed.

And once I discovered Charmed around sixth grade? Oh, it was over for everyone in my household.

Especially my mother.

Because suddenly my best friend Lucy and I were no longer just two middle school girls staying up late on a sleepover. No. We were clearly powerful witches operating a highly important magical practice out of my family’s kitchen after midnight.

The kitchen island became our potion station.

Every cabinet in the house became fair game.

Cinnamon? Spell ingredient.
Olive oil? Potion base.
Salt? Protective barrier, obviously.
Random herbs shoved in the back of the pantry since 2002? Ancient magic.

We would stay up half the night “mixing” potions into bowls and cups like tiny exhausted alchemists running an underground apothecary out of suburban Michigan. There were chants. There were candles sometimes. There were probably handwritten spells in a Lisa Frank notebook somewhere that could still summon a mild inconvenience if found today.

And the confidence we had? Unmatched.

We weren’t pretending.

That’s the funny part about childhood imagination. Adults see messes. Kids see worlds.

Lucy and I genuinely believed we were doing something important over that island table. Every weird mixture felt mystical. Every chant felt real. Every sleepover felt one step closer to discovering hidden powers buried somewhere between the spice rack and the refrigerator.

Honestly, I think that’s why witchy media resonated so hard with so many girls growing up.

It wasn’t really about magic.

It was about power.

About intuition.
About womanhood.
About secret knowledge.
About girls realizing they had inner worlds adults couldn’t fully access anymore.

Most witch stories weren’t actually teaching us how to cast spells. They were teaching us that feminine energy could be strange, emotional, powerful, messy, intelligent, misunderstood, and deeply connected.

That hits a little harder looking back as an adult woman.

Especially now that I’m the mom walking into mysterious kitchen disasters.

Because somewhere out there is another little girl dumping cinnamon into a bowl at 1 a.m. whispering nonsense incantations with absolute conviction while her exhausted mother sleeps upstairs completely unaware she’s currently housing a tiny coven.

And honestly?

Good for her🖤