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. I’m living in one of the places where those imported oranges are grown. Here, winter smells of cold earth and rain. Pecan nuts litter the streets of my neighborhood, our hot chocolate smells of Mexican vanilla and cinnamon, and people make up for the lack of snow and Northern stars by loading up on the Christmas glitz and stringing up thousands of lights. I am far more likely to smell barbecue than chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
As a child, the smell of my Christmas home was neither Northern nor Southern, but Eastern, as in the Northeastern seaboard of the United States, which is where my parents grew up, and as in China — sort of. You see, my family is Jewish, and for a wide swath of East Coast Jews, the true answer to Christmas is not Hannukah, but Chinese takeout and a movie. When my parents migrated West, they brought their Christmas traditions with them.
But in Boise in the 1970s we had to make our own takeout. So on Christmas our house smelled of sizzling peanut oil, frying scallions and fresh ginger mixing with the toasting scent of fried rice, crisping wonton skins, the bright gloopiness of lemon chicken sauce, and my favorite — pork ribs (yes, pork, it went well with our Christmas tree) soaked in a sticky, salty-sweet marinade of soy sauce, brown sugar and hoisin sauce, pungent with garlic and five spice powder, and then roasted in the oven.
I hope you’ll forgive me for not offering you a recipe. Because I can’t tell you how to create all the other scents from that time that mix together in my memory alongside that homemade Chinese-American dinner: the smells of fresh cardboard, packing materials and paint when I tagged along with my mother to help set up for the annual Christmas bazaar at the city art gallery. The rich smoke from my father’s pipe. The comfortable scent of lazy golden retriever. And the far dry down of Femme with a touch of Scotch — my parents kissing me goodnight in the dark after coming home late from a holiday party.
And after all, my father quit smoking while I was still in grade school. The gallery has become a museum. The dog is long gone. And Femme, well, you know about that. Our family traditions changed, too — it’s been a very long time since we had Chinese for Christmas, though we still go to the movies. I’m not going to promise my house won’t smell like soy sauce and pine needles on the twenty-fifth, but I need some new scents, too. What smells like home to you? What smells like celebration?
Note: I won’t be able to answer comments until the end of the day, but I can promise you that I will read every one — I really want to know your answers!
Top image is Nice little snack [cropped] by jeffreyw at flickr; some rights reserved.
Well done article Alyssa! I completely love the smells of Christmas-Cookies baking, bayberry candles burning, the smell of the tree and the sticky resin of the sap when you go to refill the water, that creamy spicy smell of eggnog, ribbon candy and I musn’t forget the smell of Polish food cooking when we would gather together for the holiday. I sure miss that! That picture you posted sure looks delicious!
Robin found the picture! And now I want won-tons for dinner…darn…
I hadn’t thought about the smell of ribbon candy in a long time, but the minute I read your comment it came to me. Very specific.
Alyssa, your description of christmas makes my mouth water! Chinese take-out sounds like the perfect christmas dinner, and worth adopting into our little family christmas.
To me, shortbread and almond smells of the holidays!
I adore shortbread. How can you go wrong with that much butter?
Shortbread is one of mine, too! I only allow myself to bake it in December. Twice. 🙂
Hi Alyssa! I grew up on the east coast as well, and the only thing that really shouts “Christmas” to me is the smell of a pine tree. I sniff ours agt least once a day! Our Christmas dinners were never big affairs, we always did some baking, but nothing specific. I do remember my Mom making pecan tassies every year for my Dad’s office Christmas party and the smell of those baking in the oven. Even though I’m not really a fan of pecan pie, I do love the tassies! We always did a Chinese meal for New Year’s – roast pork and homemade wontons!
Oh that’s so interesting about your New Year’s meal–my parents have moved their Chinese takeout night to New Years as well. They play bridge with a bunch of other couples and eat Chinese food, stopping briefly for a toast at midnight…
Easy – balsam fir and the smell of almond extract in the spritz cookies. Growing up, we always had balsam firs as Christmas trees and the only time Mom made spritz cookies was at Christmas – made with a Mirro cookie press!
Alyssa, you really had me laughing at the Chinese meal – didn’t Ralphie and family of A Christmas Story end up at a Chinese restaurant for Christmas dinner when the dog ate their ham (or was it a turkey)?
What a wonderful article this was! There is nothing more evocative than the smells of our youth. I am sorry that you won’t be able to join your family, but you must make yourself some Chinese food!
Spritz cookies! Oh my god it’s been a very long time since I had one of those. They’re the kind that you use that nozzle press thing to make, right? My mother gave up on baking once we hit adolescence and I’ve never done it myself.
Rapp, I could hardly believe it, but two days after I wrote this article the friend whose house we’re going to for Christmas dinner called me and said, “I was thinking maybe we should do a Chinese dinner this year, what do you think?”
Serendipity! That’s wonderful!
You should get yourself a cookie press and make some spritz. They are actually *very* easy to make, and fun too! I’ve noticed that the newer recipes have substituted vanilla extract for the almond, but whatever your mom did is the *right* way! 😉
Great article! And great way to talk about the perfume I just “created” the other day which I named Cheer, and based upon my own Christmas memories.
Notes: clove and orange (for the pomanders), dark vanilla, tuberose (my mother wears lots of Fracas), oakmoss, amber, cinnamon leaf, lime (gin and tonics – lots of those this time of year) and frankincense.
It gets me in quite the spirit!
Notes include: cinnamon leaf
Ooh, yum. Am imagining the tuberose playing with those other notes. Very interesting.
Becca, that sounds absolutely lovely. (I want some…)
Thanks for the well-written article, Alyssa.
Home (at Christmas) smells like balsam boughs and baked fig squares; like cold, dry, winter air and butter cookies. It smells like beeswax candles and candle smoke and like Tea for Two. It’s a smell of safety and of love and of good things about to happen.
“Good things about to happen”–I know exactly what you mean. I used to love to come upstairs very early in the morning when the rest of my family was still asleep and plug in the Christmas tree lights and just sit there in the dark. The smell of that room, at that moment…
What a wonderful article. I was almost there! Am working too, and my husband isn’t supposed to travel this year. Maybe next we will go home to the Midwest, but this year, we’re working on our own traditions – dinner out on Christmas eve, turkey on Christmas Day. No cookie making- too many calories around this house already and no candle burning as I forget them! Have a wonderful holiday and thank you for all of your great articles this past year.
Good luck with your new traditions, Kitty! The first year my husband and I were here for the holidays we ended up at a bar to hear some live music on Christmas Eve. It was packed! But gradually we realized it was packed…with other musicians. Everybody knew each other and many got up on stage to play. It was like we had stumbled into a private party accidentally. Kind of magical…
Your description of childhood Christmas reminds me a lot of mine. We were an East Coast (DC-area) Jewish family with a blend of traditions. We had a Christmas tree for my childhood years in the sixties (my mother couldn’t resist), my father smoked a pipe on and off and we loved our barbecued spare ribs. Like all sixties/early seventies couples, my parents had cocktails before dinner and before going out. I remember the smell of scotch and bourbon and my mother’s L’Interdit as they left for holiday parties.
My own home has become a mix of traditions too. Hanukah and latkes for my son and me, a traditional Christmas dinner for my husband and his family. Every few years, we have a tree, depending on which of his relatives will be around. I have to admit, I love the smell of the greenery. But I really need to do Chinese takeout to make it complete!
Oh, yay, Melisand, thanks for sharing this! I always feel very guilty about our Jewish Christmas Tree, but I did love it so…
My Muslim coworker puts up a Christmas tree. She said in part, it’s a way of assimilating into our culture (especially for her children), and in part, it’s about the joy and wonder of the season. There’s nothing Christian about the tree, after all.
See Boo, that’s so true. The tree is the most pagan part of the whole thing!
Somehow where ever I am at Christmas smells like Christmas to me — if I’m somewhere that celebrates the holiday, the thought, the care, the joy comes through.
That’s lovely.
For me, it was mostly about the tree. i used to lie underneath it and look up at the colorful decorations, sniffing the fresh pine scent happily, until the tinsel tickled my nose. Incense wafted throughout the church was Christmas to me too, but that was Serious Christmas. Playful, family Christmas was all pine and cookies baking and.the unique plastic scent of new dolls. Now of course we have artificial trees, but lots of scented candles (and maybe if I’m good a bottle of perfume under the tree rather than a doll – I hope!)
Oh I love that–Serious Christmas vs. Playful Christmas. (My mother always used to explain to me that we were celebrating Santa Claus.)
I loved the tree, too. As someone said above I remember very well getting the resin on my hands when I crawled underneath to water it–one of my family jobs.
Nice article. I love the Jewish tradition of Chinese on Christmas (I hail from the Northeast myself)… can’t believe Boise didn’t even have a Chinese restaurant!
Anyway, my favorite holiday smells are probably stereotypical ones. I love the conifer wreaths and branches, baked goods, and other good smells. And I love coming back to NJ from California around this time every year and enjoying that hard-to-explain “smell” of ice-cold air…
Happy Holidays to all!
Yes, yes, that cold air smell! Sometimes, in the middle of the six month Austin summer, when it’s still 85 degrees at 3 a.m., I just long for that exact smell…
And as for Chinese restaurants in Boise: Joe, I think there was at least one in the 70’s, but it didn’t serve anything my parents recognized as Chinese food. Later, in the 80’s, we had something called the “Wok-In” which was pretty much what it sounds like. Then, at last we had Yen Ching, to which my parents and I owe a deep, deep debt of culinary gratitude. But they’re still at the top of a very small heap…
Great article, Alyssa. I’m a Chinese-and-Movie person, too. But I married a candy-cane and wreath kinda guy. For as long as he can remember, both his grandparents and his parents wrapped bacon around smoked oysters and broiled them on Christmas Day. It was double-header trayf for me. Our compromise was that he wraps turkey bacon around water chestnuts for me. Our tree is our weeping fig, but we have a green wreath. So now Christmas smells like candles and bacon, and ginger-lemon cake, and pfeffernusse cookies, all day. And in the evening, it’s popcorn and the movies.
Quinn, I am smiling at your scent list. That’s so great. My mother used to make bacon wrapped liver as one of her 70’s cocktail party appetizers, so along with our spareribs the whole trayf thing was pretty much a lost cause for me at an early age.
Pfeffernusse! Also a favorite scent/taste for me. One of my coworkers remarked that she’d never heard of pfeffernusse, and about six of us let out a groan of agony at the thought of a life without this delicacy.
Well you can add me to the list of the deprived–but now, thanks to the fabulous reader of NST, I will go figure out what they are, and then, how to ask for them…
Alyssa – what a lovely article. I grew up on the other side of the country from your parents, but close to where you grew up – I’m from a small town in eastern Washington. Our Christmases smelled like my Mom’s beautiful bayberry candle (only lit during the holidays), the tree, lots of baking (Dad made Stollen from his Swedish background and we all made various cookies) and Mom’s Blue Grass perfume – only worn on special occasions.
We always had an orange in the bottom of our stockings. Mom grew up in Seattle during the depression and fruit was always a treat for her – whereas we children growing up on an orchard during easier times thought it a bit blase (I’ve since come to appreciate the treasure we were surrounded by! )
Christmas Day also smelled like the big turkey dinner my Mom always slaved over – a tradition I’ve done away with as I wanted to enjoy the day with my family. Instead, we eat the leftovers from a beautiful seafood salad made by my Norwegian husband for our Christmas eve dinner and the oranges and chocolate from our stockings, and relax together.
What lovely memories–and I like your new traditions, too. (Big fan of chocolate and oranges together.) You are the second or third person to mention bayberry candles and I have to admit I have no idea what they smell like. Must investigate!
Yes, you should! Love the smell of them myself, though I haven’t had one around in ages.
I was born in Michigan, so my early childhood Christmases included all the smells that one typically associates with Christmas–pine needles, wood fires burning, cold crisp air, snow We moved to Texas when I was seven,into a house devoid of a fireplace, and my parents got an artificial tree. My mother said the real trees that were available had been cut weeks earlier for shipment down South and were dry and brittle. No more fresh pine needles or wood fires–and no more cold crisp air or snow, at least most of the time. I still find though that these are the sorts of things that say “Christmas” to me; I don’t know if it is latent childhood memories or a cultural phenomenon. After all, when was the last time you saw a Christmas card showing a scene with green grass (devoid of snow), live oak or magnolia trees, or people dressed in shorts and T-shirts?
One smell (and sight) that definitely spells Christmas for me is fresh-baked stollen. (If anyone doesn’t know what stollen is, it is a type of German bread with raisins, candied fruit, and almonds in it which is traditionally eaten at Christmastime.) Now, no one in my family is particularly German–we are actually English/Scottish/Irish–but we have had stollen for Christmas morning every year since I can remember. My grandparents knew a German woman who baked loaves to give away every year, and they would bring their loaf when they came to visit for Christmas and we would have it for breakfast Christmas morning. The funny thing is, I HATED it when I was a child. By the time December 25 came around, it was a couple of weeks old and very dry and stale. When the German woman passed away, my grandparents no longer had any to bring, so my mother baked some–and I found out how wonderful it is when it is fresh. The next year I offered to make it, and I have been doing it every year since. The amount has increased over the years, and I now bake about 8 loaves, as it disappears quickly. For me, the ritual of making it, along with the smell and taste of it, has become in integral part of Christmas. Last year, I became very ill with influenza a few days before Christmas and simply did not feel up to making it. There was definitely something missing.
Oh, we had stollen some years, but just the store-bought kind. I would love to have it fresh!!!
Why don’t you try making some? It is not as hard as you might think. I can’t bake “regular” bread worth a darn, but my stollen comes our very well, if I do say so myself. The recipe I use came from a 1970’s edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook, so if you have some general purpose cookbooks, there is a good chance you already have a recipe for it. It doesn’t require kneading, as it is beaten with an electric mixer. If you really don’t have time right now, maybe try it after Christmas. You might want to get the candied fruit now, though, as it tends to disappear from the stores in January.
I love your suggestion. I’ll bet I even have the cookbook you mention!
Ah–a story of Christmas smells lost and Christmas smells found! I love that you bake the stollen. I was thinking that if I were not quite so busy, I would bake or make something like candied orange peels–something that takes awhile to assemble and fills the house and my hands and head up with scent that will last for awhile.
The last time I made stollen, instead of the citron the recipe calls for, I used candied lemon peel I made with the peels of the Meyer lemons from my tree.
Ooooh….you know, my little tree is ready for harvesting right now. Maybe I’ll give it a try!
Ooh, we have a few Meyer lemons on our tree, too!
Funny, we always bought our Stollen in Frankenmuth about a week before Christmas. My brother and I hated it too, insert any elementary “stolen” joke here and we made it. It still is not my favorite, but it makes some wonderful toast on Christmas morning. I don’t live in Michigan anymore either, but I found a Pannetone (sp?) loaf at the local grocery store and it’s a great substitute. Maybe I’ll attempt to make the Stollen next year. No doubt yours turns out better than other breads because it’s made with love and happy memories. 🙂
I loved your article, Alyssa! You have quite a complex holiday potpourri there!
I grew up in Hawai’i. We usually didn’t buy a Christmas tree because they were dried up and junky (and expensive!) by the time they got to us. So we used a live Norfolk Island pine, a pretty but scentless tree that lived in a tub year-round on our lanai. And I usually went body surfing on Christmas day. There was seaweed in the winter surf, which got tangled up in my hair.
These days, in Northern California, my hubby and I always have Dungeness crab, sourdough bread, and brussels sprouts for dinner on Christmas Eve. And I bake shortbread. So I will say that my holiday smells are salt water, seaweed, crab, sourdough, brussels sprouts, and shortbread. Weird but true!
What a wonderful comment! And if you knew my devotion to crab in general and Dungeness crab in particular you would know I’m not lying when I say your Christmas smells would be welcome at my house anytime… How lovely to have lived so near the sea all your life.
Isn’t Dungeness crab wonderful? 🙂
It’s the best. And in the SF bay area, at least, there are lots of Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants that specialize in crab dishes, so Alyssa, you could have crab AND Chinese at Christmas!
*Sigh.* OK, now I’m planning a trip to visit our friends in Berkeley for the next crab season..
Oh, I have been thinking that I need to get some brussels sprouts for Christmas dinner. It’s not a family tradition, but an English friend made delicious baked ones for her very traditional Christmas dinner a couple years ago, and I found myself thinking about brussels sprouts this week. Such a perfect winter vegetable!
Every since I learned to roast mine they are a favorite vegetable for us.
Sounds like a perfect Christmas Eve dinner to me; I was born in San Francisco, of course.
Lucky you! San Francisco is one of my father’s most beloved places. He used to take us every now and then when I was growing up, and show us the city so proudly… In fact, I cut this bit from the article, but all the ingredients for our Chinese feasts came from SF Chinatown. My mother would stock up every time we went. Our basement storeroom was full of dried chili peppers and woodears…
Very cool!
What a lovely post. It sounds like a perfect set of Christmas memories to me!
Thanks, March! And a happy holiday to you!
Happy holidays Alyssa and everyone else, no matter what you celebrate. This was a fantastic article and your Christmas Day dinner description made me hungry, Alyssa! 🙂 I’m sorry you can’t be with the ones you love this season but wish you warmth, happiness and a wonderful day however you enjoy it. Your description of each scent is so perfect and as someone who’s experienced this holiday season both in the North and South (we spent one Christmas in Texas with my wintering grandparents), I could really appreciate the differences.
I think of where I live now (western Michigan) as home, so for the holidays, the smell of a house during winter which I can’t explain but is distinctly different than a house in summer, incense, various spicy/pine candles, condensed milk simmering on the stove for fudge, a hint of wood smoke, the way our holiday decorations smell of cinnamon when we unpack them as some of our home made ornaments were made of a kid-friendly “clay” made from apple sauce, cloves and cinnamon then sculpted, baked and decorated, the bracing smell of freshly fallen snow, the sweet perfume of candy cane scented little ones wriggling into my lap, the inevitable smell of new electronics for Mr. Ab. Scent’s gifts, egg nog and brandy which I don’t like to drink but love to smell, the smell of Scotch tape from wrapping gifts and all the baking… The sweet spicy warmth of pumpkin bread or absolutely delicious fragrance of baked French toast casserole accompanied by mimosas in the morning and then glasses of champagne later that evening… All of that smells like home during the holidays for me. I long to add real pine decor to the mix but just haven’t felt like dealing with all the needles on top of rambunctious kiddos.
When I was growing up in the country and another part of the state, Christmas smelled of apples and oranges, my mother’s friendship bread that always seemed to be in the process of rising or baking, our wood burning stove that was the best combination of smoke and dangerously hot metal (I wish CDG could bottle that one), Christmas dinner of course, our real Christmas tree wich was almost always grabbed on Christmas Eve at the last minute lol, hints of wet Boston Terrier just in from the snow and frantically running laps to dry out and warm up and best of all, my mother’s elaborate Christmas bread which was a crescent-shaped loaf stuffed with brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and pecans and topped by a fantastic buttery glazed icing and alternating whole pecans and maraschino cherries. I don’t usually like that treatment of the cherry, but it was fantastic all mixed up with all the other flavors.
The holidays aren’t always smooth and joyful, but it is amazing how many wonderful fragrant memories I have that link together to form a patchwork of wonderful moments that could never be bottled.
Wow! I feel like you’ve just given me two dozen Christmas roses–what a really fantastic list of scents and people and memories. I know what you mean about the cold house–something about how the wood and fabrics smell in the winter cold as opposed to the warmth of summer. It’s especially noticeable when you walk into a room that’s relatively unused…
Thank you for your wonderful comment!
Alyssa –
What a lovely post! I love the idea of Christmas Translated! Mine own Christmas traditions have evolved over the years/decades/eons/zzzzzzzz 🙂
I used to do a huge celebration, following my mother’s tradition…then it got smaller..now I enjoy blooming paperwhites and hope for a quiet day, a good meal (home-cooked but not ‘involved’) and an even quieter evening.
Have a lovely Christmas!
xoA
Thank you M! Wishing you the quiet you so deserve, and maybe someone to help you in the kitchen, if you want it…
Alyssa, thank you for a heartfelt and nostalgic post. I remember dad’s pipe smoke as well, and Indian Pudding, roasted lamb, scalloped oysters, and brandy from the Cherries Jubilee on Christmas Eve.
I hope that you have someone special to spend this time of year with, even if it’s not a holiday for you. 🙂
Thank you for the good wishes and compliments Elizabeth! Yes, I am very, very lucky to have good friends, my DH, and a small tribe of animals to celebrate with here in Austin. Hope your holiday is wonderful!
Elizabeth, scalloped oysters sure sound yummy!
My Christmas fragrance consists of the stereotypical smells- tree, eggnog, cookies, but best of all, it’s the sand and the candle wax and the brown paper bags that make up a luminaria. I don’t know if they extend into Texas, but it was a family tradition to set up luminarias on Christmas Eve when I was growing up in New Mexico. I still do it here in Portland, even if it confuses my neighbors! And let’s not forget the smell of burned paper bag, when the candle wasn’t set up well…
Oh, yay! My husband (who is Mexican American) made luminarias last year. The paper bag part always worries me, but it seems to work out. 😉 Just down the way from us, there is a public golf course that lets a local group do a huge display of them and you can walk through. But they use plastic milk bottles…
What a beautiful post, Alyssa, and beautiful comments from everyone – best wishes for the holidays and New Year to all!
Nostalgic Christmas scents would definitely include pine, peppermint ice cream, and black cherry jello, because my mother always made a jello salad at Christmas with black cherry jello, canned black cherries, tiny cubes of creamed cheese, walnuts, celery and slice green, pimento-stuffed olives.
These days it’s AG Noël parfum pour la maison and Encens Flamboyant for me. 🙂
Wow, Noz. That jello salad. I am dying to see a picture.
And I almost pulled the trigger on that AG room spray. Maybe there will still be some after the holiday…
Thank you for this fragrant walk through holidays past, Alyssa. The predominant winter home-scent for us is a balsam fir needle incense we use just for the holidays. When burned, it makes our small suburban apartment smell as though there’s a roaring Yuletide hearth fire hidden somewhere out of sight. Here’s a URL: http://tinyurl.com/balsamincense
Oooh, thank you for the link, that sounds like something I would love. I’ve been burning copal resin, which is sort of a related smell from much further South.
Being from the southern hemisphere its summer here-or trying to be- so Christmas usually smells of newly mown lawns, roses and big asian lillies, from my garden-we call them Christmas lillies. I also burn a few Christmas candles to add a festive smell-this year I found a new store and ended up with White Christmas, Berry Christmas and Holly.
Oh and by the way Merry Christmas!
Thank you Debbie, I loved hearing about lilies and roses for Christmas. And Happy Holidays to you, too!
Almonds, cherries, clementines, spices, baked cookies/ bread, evergreens, eggnog, cranberry punch, kerosine (heater)… what am I forgetting… are the smells of my childhood Christmas. Woodsmoke, pomanders, snow/ crisp air, and heavy orientals that warm as well as a thick shawl are Christmas smells I appreciate in adulthood.
Mom and I were super bakers come Christmas. We would always bake almond crescents, gingersnaps, cherry coconut macaroons, sugar cookies, date nut bread and banana nut bread.
Mmmm, I am right on board with all of those, adult smells included. You make me want to put on some Coco.
Christmas to me is always a summer thing (I’m Australian) so smells like suntan oil, BBQ and the smell of rain after a stinking hot day are what I think of! However I do have a pine tree in the house right now and I love the waft you get when you walk past it. I also have a German heritage so things like spicy German biscuits are also Christmas smells to me.
Not sure what perfume reminds me of Christmas but I am hoping for Balenciaga Paris under the tree this year!
Same-Australian with German heritage (my father)! Hope you are having better-summer-weather where you are! At least they have forecast a warm, sunny Christmas Day here-then the weather turns awful again-great.
BBQ is a Christmas smell for us, too. Wishing you Balenciaga!
It is a beautiful post, Alyssa! I really enjoyed taking me with you as you describe the smells, the places, and the people. It is very moving. Thank you.
Thank you, V. You’ve often taken me on the same journey…
Yummmm….pfeffernuesse and lebkuchen (gingerbread); stollen; springerle (the rolled cookies made with a special imprinted rolling pin), vanillekipferl, spekulatius, and my favorite zimtsterne (Cinnamon flavored star-shaped cookies). My grandparents were German-born and brought the recipe book with them to America. 🙂 In a German household something is always baking and everyone gathers in the kitchen to be front and center for the endless stream of goodies that issue forth. If I were to describe our Christmases only by scent, it would be an exotic and wonderful amalgam of spices, pine sap, wet wool clothes warming over every grate and on a rack in front of the fire, sauerkraut (we were absolutely the only family I knew whose holiday meals always included sauerkraut), and L’Air du Temps.
No, L’Air du Temps is not a German Christmas tradition – lol – but ever since my grandmother received a bottle as a gift one year and the sprayer stuck full on and drenched the room until the bottle was nearly dry, it just isn’t a Christmas without it. To this day, some 40 years later, I still spray some around the house as an offering to the Ghosts of Christmas Past.
Sauerkraut and L’Air du Temps! Now I don’t feel so odd about soy sauce and pine needles… 😉 You’ve painted a very vivid picture of your family gathering. I can see and smell it.
Great post Alyssa! Holiday smells are the best kind. Anything that smells like home-baked goods, fresh cut pine, that weird attic smell that comes down with the decorations, the wonderful smell of snow, etc. are all great to me. My current traditions make me think of you though – we have no decent asian or Thai restaurants where we live. The past two years, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and whip up all kinds of Thai dishes over the holidays. The smells are so festive and warming. It is fun for me and my husband to enjoy. I’ll let my mom keep up the traditional dinner cooking. The taste of Thai makes my husband and I feel less like we live in the middle of nowhere. Which is all nice for the snow, but not for the rest of it! Except of course, anytime there is a snow day in the boonies we always bake cookies.
Now I am imagining the smells of snow, cookies, keffir lime and lemongrass… I can see how it would be another version of the Northern+Southern smells with all those citrus infused spices–even the gingery galangal. Lucky you, knowing how to whip up a good Thai meal. Glad you can get the ingredients!
Late to the party, but wanted to tell you that was a great article.
Christmas tree is my smell. That is the one that brings it home. I can smell all the cinnamon and oranges and potpourri in the world, but it’s not Christmas until I smell fir.
Thank you, Tama! Hope you git plenty of fir tree this Christmas!
Thank you so much for a wonderful trip down memory lane. This Christmas is the first one in which I will not be returning to my childhood home nor seeing my family. It is nice to think about all of the things that “make” the holiday because so far it just doesn’t feel like Christmas.
I have the standard pine tree, fireplace, hot chocolate (replaced by hot butter rum’s as an adult) memories, but the one that really stands out in citrus. The annual fundraiser for my school’s band and choir programs was a fruit sale. It was always delivered the day school let out for winter vacation. We’d have a few cases each of grapefruits, oranges, tangerines, and clementines and the fragrance filled the entire house. I also remember never wanting to see another orange again in my life by January, but I’ll save that story for another time.
Hee, hee! Well at least they smelled good at first. We sold bad candybars…
Wishing you good luck in making a holiday happen for yourself. I found my first time away from home oddly freeing, though I did miss everyone.