I won’t be going home for the holidays this year. Work, distance, and the difficulties of holiday travel in a time of war and other strange weathers mean I’ll be in Texas while the rest of my family is up in Idaho. So I’ve been thinking about the smells of Christmas, and of home, of the North and the South, and the places where they come together, and the places where they don’t.
The most expected smells of Christmas — the ones most likely to appear in limited edition perfumes, soaps and candles — are the smells of a Northern winter festival. The cool scents of pine and peppermint (all those candy canes), hints of snow, crystalline air, tree-covered mountains and those Northern night skies that seem so much blacker, and whose stars seem so much sharper and brighter than any I see in the South. To combat the cold, there’s the scent of woodsmoke from the hearth, and the smells of all those precious things imported from Southern climes: spices — especially the woody warmth of cinnamon and nutmeg, the heat of dried ginger and the cool-hot prickle of clove; oranges, which smell and look so much like the sun should that they hardly need explaining; and cacao, in the form of chocolate eaten in the hand, or melted into rich hot milk.
It’s an appealing combination — so appealing that all sorts of people who don’t celebrate, or even understand Christmas enjoy it (in Japan, for example, Christmas has been translated into a kind of Alpine-fantasy Valentine’s day). But it may or may not be the smell of your winter holiday, or your home…
