Make your home smell like the holidays
I have a small confession to make. That lovely forest scent that everybody loves when they come over to our place for the holidays isn’t actually coming from the tree.
Yes, it’s true that most years we do make a thing out of driving to the country for the afternoon and chopping down a real live balsam fir, but that isn’t actually why our house smells like the great outdoors.
To be perfectly honest, our freshcut trees aren’t any more aromatic than the poor ones shedding needles outside Canadian Tire.
We might claim a preference for the naturalness of the boughs of the less commercially raised version, but probably we only go to the bother of chopping down a fresh one because it’s a good excuse for a fun afternoon.
No, the reason that our house smells like a forest over the holidays is that, along with putting up boughs and lighting up every dark corner with candles and decorating the tree, I secretly resort to a bit of behind-the-scenes aromatic stagesetting.
In this regard I have a couple of remarkably fresh-scented props I tend to rely on.
One is a lovely candle by Thymes (thymes.com) called Frasier fir that comes in a pleasingly simple glass jar and smells exactly like a walk in a crisp forest (I have no idea how they do this, but it really is uncanny). And the other is a gloriously oldschool incense stick from a family-run company in Auburn, Me., that’s been making fully natural scented products from the forest floor since 1931 called Paine’s (paineproducts.com).
So unintentionally lumberjack chic is Paine’s packaging that you can now run across their balsam sticks in those meticulously curated hipster boutiques that don’t sell much else beyond an obscure brand of soap or the odd vintage Japanese indigo scarf.
But I have treasured my Paine’s incense since I first stumbled across a box of the stuff as a teenager in a general store on a family trip to Cape Cod.
There is something so very convincing in its pure and unadulterated balsam scent that you hardly need to burn it to enjoy its transporting effect. Not to mention something so dear about the old- fashioned green-and-white box it comes in, that I have always snapped up extras on the rare occasions that I came across it and even kept empty boxes of the stuff in my drawers. Now, of course, like everything else, it is readily available online, and yet few things now actually feel as precious.
Which is why, as far as I’m concerned, the holidays are precisely the right time of year to pull out all the stops when it comes to stagecraft.
The holidays, whatever one’s faith or inclination to mark or celebrate them, are all about sharing light and warmth with the people we love — and with whatever secret tools we might have in our back pocket to make the magic happen. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Her new book, What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss, is published by the House of Anansi Press. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.