Whenever I smell peach potpourri, I am always reminded of my 18th birthday because my give-aways at my debut were little baskets filled with dried barks of peach fragrance. Isn’t it interesting when we walk into a room and smell something that triggers certain memories from the past? How often have you gotten a sniff of a particular scent and it fills you with nostalgia and brings back feelings from a particular experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant?
“Scents have an uncanny ability to trigger memories because they are the only sense that directly connects to the part of the brain that stores emotional memories“. Because of this, I always use cinnamon-scented candles in our home every Christmas, and I don’t use it on any other time of the year. I want my children to associate that scent with happy memories from our Christmas celebrations. I want my children, when they are all grown-up already, to smell cinnamon and say “Hey, that scent brings back a lot of good feelings from our childhood Christmases!”
The fragrance of cinnamon was not a purposeful choice. It’s just that years ago, when I first shopped around for red candles, most of them came in cinnamon scent. And we loved it! So we stuck with it and continued to use it for Christmas year after year.
So as you decorate your homes for Christmas, remember what a little fragrance can do. It doesn’t have to be cinnamon, it can be vanilla or pine, but whatever scent you choose, the more important thing is to build good memories that your children can associate with it.
Well, I hope to do better this year.