SCENTS OF CHRISTMAS

When I was growing up, our Winter dining room always smelled of apples and rustly paper and the velvety linings of all the buffet drawers where the set of Michelangelo, with its six extra serving pieces AND the Hostess Set, resided amongst all the half-burned candles and the fountain pens and used-up husks of checkbooks.  There was such a cold smell in there, as if you were stepping into a restaurant cooler, minus the scents of black rubber gaskets and that salty aroma of Aunt Lou’s big red Co-Cola case.

 

The entire room was red---carpet and Miss Scarlett drapes-with-cords

and even the drawer-linings and the velvety fabric in the cuts of the wood-filigree sconces.   And red was how it Smelled.   Not roses or crayons or even beets---though there was an obligatory little clear dish of the pickles on the Thanksgiving and Christmas tables---but just apples.  

Tradition still held that every stocking must have an apple in it, and perhaps an orange, with an enticing handful of mixed nuts in the shells, way down in the toe.

 

 

 

 

Nobody tore into the stocking or dumped it out on the couch---not anybody I knew.   We savored that stocking, whether family rule was open it first, or presents first.  An experimental fondle of the stocking-toe would be a mysterious thing---was that a walnut, or did it have just enough give to be a new red ball, with jacks scattered into the mix?   Brazil Nuts were easy, but could that possibly be a new bracelet-charm, perhaps a mustard-seed in its little clear faddish globe, instead of a hazelnut?  And pecans---those conjured many covetable items of their size and shape, all looked at longingly and admired in Ben Franklin for weeks before Christmas.   Little lipsticks and tiny colognes and samples from the Avon lady, saved up for stockings, or maybe even a pack or two of Red-Hots in their crinkly little sawtooth cellophane.

After the fudge-making, the table was covered with long slick sheets of Cut-Rite, with the far ends still trying to curl around the last rows of candy.   The little nut-filled patties were then stored in the golden treasure-tins which had once---once per year, in fact---held those most delightful of confections---Hostess Fruitcake.  

Not Fruit Cake---Fruitcake.  It had to be all one word, with Fruit as the emphasis, for those glistening round red cherries, glaceed within an inch of their sweet, sweet lives, and the hunks of sugary pineapple and the crisp pecan halves---those were the main ingredients.   There was just enough of a light, moist-but-the outsides-a-little-bit-crumbly cake to hold all those pounds of magic into every judiciously-doled slice. 

This is the loaf of today, but I imagine it must have come in this long-ago tin,

 

 

which for all my childhood contained Mammaw’s spools of thread.  It, on the other hand, smelled of tangy old metal and dust and Coats & Clark's fading away in the dark.

. 

 

Even the can-and-lid were beautiful, like some three-pound bauble on Marie Antoinette’s table.  The gold was patterned in lace all over, with a slightly-raised cameo effect of a serenely beautiful lady holding a cake on a plate.  And you know, not until I looked up the pictures just now, did I ever really notice the blue.  They were gold and perfect and such reliquaries of all that was covetable, even at Christmas, shining as if lit from within with some magical light.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I’d just go furtively work my fingers along that tight round lid, raising just one side an inch, so as to inhale that annual-only fragrance of such magnificence.   There was the scent of fruit, and browned crumb, and an elusive tang of something so rich and strange I could not name it.  And you know, that was such a holy-of-holies that it never once occurred to me to sneak a slice, or to pry one of those immense translucent cherries from their cushion of cake. They just clung there, encased like I imagined diamonds in a mine, and it was a sacred thing never to be touched, right up there with the shelf-only doll in the elaborate white dress crocheted by my Other Mammaw.   Why, we practically HAD the gold and frankincense and myrrh, right there in the dining room.

 

 

And inside the tin, the care and respect were carried on in a crisp, rustly mantle of cellophane, which was topped with a silvery doily, in turn centered with a small red satin bow.   What ELEGANCE, what charm, and even without the cake, all that beautiful would have been enough.   And with every slice, the cellophane was carefully re-arranged, the doily replaced, the bow centered, just for the import of the thing.

 

I don’t remember that the dining room ever did smell of the cake, despite my frequent open-and-close of that exotic humidor, but of apples and chocolate and vague spices, wrapped in the equally-rare chill of Winter.

And what is YOUR Scent of Christmas?



Joining my Apples and Fruitcake to Miz Beverly's Pink Saturday at How Sweet The Sound.