Why I’m Adding Holiday Smells to My Holiday Decorations.

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This morning, on my way home from the gym, I walked by a stand selling Christmas trees and holiday greenery (in New York City, these pop up on street corners every December). I loved getting the chance to smell that wonderful fragrance of Christmas tree.

It struck me: I’ve done a lot of holiday decorating, but we don’t have any holiday smells.

Because it’s so hard to deal with a real tree in a New York City apartment, and because we always spend a week at my parents’ house at Christmas–where my mother puts up the largest and most gorgeous display of holiday decorations you’ve ever seen–we don’t put up a live tree. We use a small grove of tabletop, goose-feather trees to show off our ornaments. I’ve been collecting one ornament a year since I was a baby, and my girls have, too, so we have quite a few.

But an artificial tree doesn’t have a smell.

For Happier at Home, I adopted a resolution that has become one of my very favorite resolutions: Cultivate good smells. I’ve become enchanted with the power and pleasure of the sense of smell.

My walk this morning inspired me to add olfactory decorations to enhance our visual decorations.

To create a holiday feeling, I want to add the smell of pine tree, paper-white narcissus, and wood smoke. I can’t buy the wood smoke, but I can buy a wreath and a bowl of paper-whites. Their fragrance would add a lot to the holiday spirit of our home.

However, I know myself. I say that I would love to do this, but as an under-buyer, it’s hard for me to buy such things—especially things that don’t last. Can I really get myself to do it? I’m really going to push myself this year. I’ll report back!

What smells do you associate with the holidays? Do you take steps to make sure that that smell is part of the holiday experience? Boy, I wish there were a nicer word for “smell.”

From 2006 through 2014, as she wrote The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, Gretchen chronicled her thoughts, observations, and discoveries on The Happiness Project Blog.

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