It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Christmas

Lilek’s Bleat today is absolutely side-splitting. The Mrs. and I were rolling on the floor laughing (heretofor ROTFL).

Just replaced the downstairs family room fragrance infusers with Evergreen scent.

Thought you should know.

Wouldn’t want you to be out of the loop.

(Well, it’s important; the little details count. Especially when the tree was DOA, and yields as much Genuine Tree Smell as a varnished hockey stick. I rotate aromas through the year – apple in the fall, which yields to pumpkin, which yields to pine. Then the great question of what winter should smell like, since it smells of nothing except weariness and claustrophobia. Then something faintly floral for spring. Just writing this makes my testosterone levels drop. But there’s no reason your house can’t smell good, and there’s no reason the smell shouldn’t be apt. I’m not talking some BIG HUGE SMELL that sticks its fingers up your nose; I mean something indistinct and vague, as if Kate Moss was off stage crushing apple wedges between her knees. Not that she’d have the strength. You’d have to mash them up. And they’d smell like cigarettes. Nevermind.)

I also have a can of Tree, in case of emergency. And a can of Cranberry for the vestibule, because something died in that space in 1956, and its spirit rests uneasily. The best of the lot is “Winterberry,” made by Bath & Body Works (warning! Do not spray on body or use in bath) and of course they don’t make it this year; they have “Spice,” which I instantly avoided, and “Caramel,” which, as I noted in a Quirk, smells like Willie Wonka threw up in the hallway. I’ll go with Tree. Can’t go wrong with Tree.

I wish they would come out with Club, which had the aroma of cigars and polished leather and roast-beef belches and newspapers that had been baking by the radiator all day. Something comfortingly imperial. One whiff and you’ll feel the need to harrumph about the Suez! New Club. It’ll put class in your house and hair in your ears. But no, we banish cigar aromas here; I use Ozium, a handy tool from dorm days. Ozium is the absolute amnesia inducer for smoke; it simply ceases to remember what it smells like.