09/15/2026
I most definately need to rewatch watch Pratical Magic 1, before I watch Pratical Magic 2, AND before October 31! Does anyone know if the local WITCHES will be paddling on Lake Lytle on October 31st this year?
Maybe Practical Magic didnât change. Maybe we did.
Do you remember the first time you watched it? We came for that incredible house, the herbs hanging in the kitchen, the black cat, Gillian blowing into town like a redheaded hurricane, and of course midnight margaritasâwhich convinced an entire generation that dancing around the kitchen with your sisters and a can of whipped cream could probably fix damn near anything. đ But underneath all that beautiful magic was something deeper. Practical Magic knew what it felt like to be the woman who didnât quite fit.
Sally spent so much of that first movie trying to be normal. She didnât want the whispers or the looks. She didnât want her daughters teased because their mother was different. Gillian went the other directionâif the world was going to call her wild, she might as well give them something to talk about. Somewhere between those two sisters, a lot of us recognized ourselves.
Because witch wasnât always a word women proudly claimed. It was a word used to make women smallerâthe strange ones, the independent ones, the intuitive ones, the women who knew things, felt things, spoke too loudly or simply refused to become what everyone else expected them to be.
And then I read an interview with Sandra Bullock that made me love all of this even more.
Sandra talked about how brutal the reception of the first Practical Magic was. She said they were criticized for being âtoo much,â âtoo witchy,â âtoo many women,â and she admitted that she carried shame from that for years. Looking back now, she realized they hadnât made something wrong at all. As she put it, âIt was just 28 and change years too early.â
She also talked about reclaiming the word witch, and this may be my favorite part. Sandra said the word had always carried a negative meaning, but now âthe word is being taken back,â with people proudly saying, âIâm a witch and Iâm proud.â
Think about that for a minute.
Almost thirty years ago, we watched Sally Owens desperately trying not to be known as the witch. She wanted to fit in. She wanted her children to fit in. She wanted the whispers to stop.
And here we are now, some of the very same women who watched that movie in 1998, saying proudly: Yes. I am a witch.
Weâve lived some life since then. Weâve loved, lost, raised families, changed direction, started over, found our people and learned that becoming completely yourself may be the most practical magic of all.
And Sandra talked about one more thing that gets right to the heart of why this story has stayed with us: sisterhood. She described Sally and Gillian as two halves of a whole and talked about what it means when you finally call someone you love and say you need helpâand they show up.
That is Practical Magic to me.
When everything goes completely to hell, the women come. They bring their brooms, their candles, their strength and whatever else they have. They donât ask whether you made every decision perfectly before deciding whether you deserve their help. They donât stand outside judging how you got yourself into the mess.
They show up.
Thatâs the kind of sisterhood I want around me, and itâs the kind I want to give back.
So watching Practical Magic 2 now doesnât feel like simply revisiting a movie we loved. It feels a little like coming home. Sally and Gillian are older, and so are we. I donât need them frozen in 1998. Give me the laugh lines, the mistakes, the wisdom, the losses, the daughters who grew up and the women they became.
Because magic doesnât disappear when women get older.
Maybe it gets stronger.
And if the neighbors are still whispering?
Let them whisper.
We have margaritas to make. đ€
