October is when the table goes up in my house. A cloth, a glass of water, and the candle I named for my grandmother.
October is when the table goes up in my house, and the ancestral protection candle goes on it.
Nothing elaborate. A cloth, a glass of water, a plate of whatever I cooked that week. Photographs of the ones I have photographs of. For the ones I don't, a name said out loud does the same work.
My grandmother came up out of Charleston in 1959 and set the Lowcountry down in a Queens apartment. She passed when I was thirteen. She never once sat me down and explained a thing. I got it from being underfoot, watching her hands move, hearing what she said while she was saying it to somebody else.
That is how most of this came to me. Not as lessons. As the weather in the house.
The candle I light
My Grandmama Prayed For Me is the ancestral protection candle that sits on my table in October. I named it for her.
It is haint blue. In Gullah Geechee houses that color went on porch ceilings and window frames, because a haint cannot cross water and blue reads like water. I grew up around that color before anybody told me what it was for.
The salt in it comes off the coast of West Africa. That is a longer story than a label holds, so I told it properly over in the Root Library.
How I Burn My Ancestral Protection Candle
I light it in the evening, after the house has gone quiet. I say the names I know. Some nights I say what is going on with me out loud, the way you would talk to somebody sitting across from you.
Four hours and then I put it out. Some nights I do not get through what I meant to say, and I pick it back up the next evening.
That is the whole of it. I am not going to dress it into a ceremony it is not.
If you are just starting
You do not need me and you do not need an ancestor candle from my shop. A glass of water on a shelf and a name said out loud is enough to honor your ancestors, and it costs nothing. If you want to build it out, I walk through how to set up an ancestor altar step by step.
If you want the candle, it is here. I poured it at my own table.
Product details
- 8 oz, coconut apricot wax, wooden wick
- Fixed with roots, oils, black tourmaline, and prayer
- Includes the ritual card and the Ritual Essentials Kit
- Hand-poured in Queens, NY
All Geechee Mama products are handcrafted spiritual curios, made by a practicing rootworker with ancestral lineage to support your intentions. No specific spiritual, physical, or financial results are promised. Burn instructions and care are on the product page and on the jar.