Choosing the right Christmas candles
Christmas candles come down to one decision, which is the scent you want to walk into. Our festive fragrances run from the full and traditional to the deliberately restrained, and knowing roughly where you want to sit on that does most of the choosing.
Spiced orange and red berry is the classic, and the most full-bodied. It opens on mandarin, softens through cinnamon and clove, and settles on a base of warm amber. This is the mulled wine end of Christmas, sweet and citrus-led, and it does its best work where people gather in the evening, or in a hallway where coats and cold air come in with them.
Pine and clove are drawn from the tree rather than the kitchen. Pine needle and eucalyptus sit over cedarwood, cinnamon and clove, on the same amber base, giving a cooler, greener, more resinous scent, closer to a fir branch than a spice tin. It is the one to light beside one of our Christmas trees, which are made to be brought out year after year rather than bought and replaced, and it is what supplies the scent of a real fir without asking you to give up a tree that lasts. It suits a room that is already warm.
Clementine and sandalwood take the season at a lower volume. Clementine and cassis sit over nutmeg and winter flowers, grounded in sandalwood and patchouli rather than amber, which is what makes it the quiet one. Choose it where a heavier fragrance would fight with cooking, a real tree, or a room that is already doing a lot.
The spiced orange and the pine and clove are worth knowing about together. Both are built on warm amber, and both carry mandarin, cinnamon and clove, so they can burn in the same house on the same evening without arguing with one another. Clementine and sandalwood go a different route entirely, which is why it is the one that gives a room a rest from spice.
How our Christmas candles are made
The wax is the reason a scent behaves the way it does. Our scented Christmas candles are poured from a natural plant wax, blended from soy and rapeseed, with coconut in some of them, and it holds essential oils and releases them gradually as the candle burns rather than throwing everything into the room in the first hour. The note structures come from working with one of the world's leading fragrance houses, which is why there is a top, a heart and a base that arrive in order rather than all at once.
The wicks are cotton, which burns evenly and keeps the pool of melted wax level right out to the glass. A candle that tunnels down the middle strands wax against the sides and loses you hours you have already paid for, so an even burn is a quality question rather than a tidiness one.
The vessels are recycled brown glass, drawn from vintage apothecary jars, and they are meant to be kept. Once the wax is finished, the jar is simply a jar again. The reed diffusers follow the same thinking without a flame, holding 100ml of oil and ten natural rattan reeds that draw the fragrance up and release it steadily. The same approach runs through our candles and home fragrance collection, which carries the scents we make for the rest of the year.
The advent candle, hand-dipped in Denmark
One candle here is not poured at all. Our advent candle is hand-dipped in Denmark by a family-run workshop that has been perfecting the method for more than half a century, built up in layer after layer to its tapered shape rather than set in a mould, then finished with hand-painted countdown numbers down its length.
It is unscented, and it is made from paraffin, which is the traditional wax for a hand-dipped taper. Both of those are deliberate. An advent candle is lit briefly every day for most of a month, usually on a table where people are eating, and it is the one candle in the house that should add light and a small ritual without adding fragrance to the room as well. It sits easily alongside the rest of the Christmas table decorations.
