Smells like Christmas spirit

Jeanette Winterson’s ode to the most memorable of festive aromas

Christmas starts with the smell of mince pies in the oven. I make my own because it is quick, satisfying and fills the kitchen with festive pleasure. You can cut the sugar, mould them small and delicious and use Nigella’s tip of adding vodka to the pastry to leave them crisp and bright. I swear that making mince pies is as easy as keeping goldfish – and you don’t feel guilty about eating them.

When I was a child, our Christmas began on 21st December – the solstice, when my mother arrived home, as always in her own personal weather system of frost and hail, to deposit a goose to be plucked (by me) while she sat stuffing oranges with cloves. I still do the oranges and cloves – a couple for mulled wine and a couple for the house, too – because the scent is heady and long-lasting. I find that kids enjoy this simple repetitive task, and it takes their minds off endlessly buying stuff, or believing that Christmas comes ready-wrapped. I always seem to have little kids around and I take them to the woods to unravel long strands of ivy and find berry bushes and pine cones we can use for decoration. The scents of the natural world in winter aren’t the floral scents of summer – now the world changes to something astringent, truffle-y; the deep introspective smells of midwinter. It’s lovely to fill both hands with cones, leaves, berries and breathe them deep. There is no shop that sells this – by the time it gets there it is too old – but you are following the old tradition of bringing the outdoors inside. That’s what the yule log is, not the chocolate variety.

I love candles. My real weakness is Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir (£44). Pomegranate, like oranges and dates, is a reminder of the Arab influences on the Christmas feast – a little bit of Palestine brought home is how Shakespeare and friends understood the exotic fruits and spices that only appeared at Christmas. Elizabeth I made gingerbread men – well, gingerbread queens in her own image – and I was so delighted when I discovered this fact that I bake gingerbread men myself now. It’s another perfect Christmas smell, especially if you have a mug of mulled wine steaming beside you and, even better, an open fire.

Then there’s the weather. When we live in the city we forget the sharp wintry smell of rain as it falls in the fields through the bare branches of trees. Take a walk, leave behind the crazy world of the present list and give yourself a chance to reconnect to this ancient and mysterious time – the 12 days of Christmas. If I were coming with you, I’d pack a chunk of white Stilton or Keen’s cheddar, a big piece of fruitcake or some of those mince pies we made earlier, and a little bottle of sloe gin. Anyone can make their own sloe gin. You just have to pick the hedgerow sloes after the first frost and bottle them with a London Dry Gin. A year later when you unscrew the top, there is a sweet, deep, pluminess that sits on the tongue with the tang of the cheese.

Then it’s home for a hot bath and essential oils of pine, cloves and a little geranium. Put on your dressing gown and open a bottle of pink Champagne, and smell the skin of the grapes from the bottle’s summer, so seductive in the cold of winter. It’s Christmas, after all.