I Sniffed These Candles So You Don't Have To

For most of the month of October I was sick. Sick as a dog. If I wasn’t shivering and shaking hard enough to jar the fillings from my teeth, I was sprawled on the sofa licking my parched lips and listening to the sounds of the buzzards circling the desert sands upon which I seemingly had been abandoned. I was weak. I was miserable.

But thanks to the specialist I’ve been seeing, I’m feeling better. Thanks for asking. And then my husband, sweet guy that he is, decided to cheer me up by taking us on a quick weekend getaway to Vermont. He had it all planned out; we’d stay at a historic little bed and breakfast in the mountains, we’d maybe visit some kind of place that sold (what else) maple products, we’d visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory, we’d explore downtown Burlington.

He even, as I found out on the morning of our departure, had selected where we would eat that night. “I’ve found the perfect restaurant,” he told me.

“What’s the name of it?” I asked, contemplating my socks.

“Um, I’ve forgotten.”

“What do they serve?”

“You know,” he said. “Smoked . . . things . . . and pig stuff.”

“Mmmm,” I said, rubbing my belly. “Smoked things and pig stuff. You know, honey, the world of advertising daily mourns that you did not share with them your abundant descriptive gifts.”

“Shut up!” he said. With affection, I’m sure.

I’ve never been to Vermont before. I didn’t know the danger that lurked on the freeway between here and there. It wasn’t until we’d traversed Connecticut and most of Massachusetts that I even noticed a highway advertisement for the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. Out of politeness, I wasn’t sure whether I should mention it or not. When I saw Craig craning his neck in order to read the details. I kept my mouth shut.

To say that my husband, in the past, has had a little bit of a candle addiction problem is an understatement. When we moved three years ago, I had to dispose of two giant Hefty bags full of unused candles—it felt like about two hundred pounds’ worth of wax that I hauled out to the curb or dumped on friends’ doorsteps. He doesn’t use the candles, mind you. He just buys them. Then he hides them away from the light of day while talking to himself, like Gollum with the One Ring. Taking him to the Yankee Candle flagship store seemed like it would be a little bit like driving a recovering alcoholic to the Smirnoff Factory Outlet, or parachuting a heavy cocaine user right into El Salvador with unmarked treasury bills strapped to his chest.

But, you know. It was a mini-vacation. And he’d gone to all the trouble of arranging the bed-and-breakfast and a dinner of pig stuff. When we passed an urgent last-chance! turn here now! billboard on the road and I saw that longing look in his eyes, I couldn’t resist. “Do you want to go?” I asked. “We can go.”

I still have the bump on my head from the hard swerve he took onto the exit lane.

What I recall of the Yankee Candle flagship store is as a feverish dream; I’m still not sure how much of my memories were actually potpourri-induced hallucinations. From the outside, I was led to expect that the store itself would be perhaps a little larger than the average mall candle franchise. Once inside, however, I realized it was a Tardis-like never-ending expanse of rooms full of wax-filled bottles in every shade of the rainbow opening into other rooms containing even more candles in even more eye-popping colors and nose-stripping scents, opening into confusing corridors lined with popcorn and fudge vendors that circled back into even more rooms filled with even more candles. I vaguely remember a room filled with artificial spruces and Christmas candles in which fake snow blew down onto us from the ceiling. There was a room full of gargoyles and candles of a deep purple hue. For over an hour we wandered without direction from place to place, uncertain what would lie around the next corner (but still pretty certain all the same that it would involve candles) and wondering when it would end.

If there is a Limbo, it’s a lot like the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. We basically were trapped in an Escher engraving, if Escher had ever accepted a commission from the Association of American Beeswax Manufacturers. And along the way, I smelled a lot of candles. A lot of candles. In fact, I regard my excursion into the dark heart of the Yankee Candle Factory as a selfless act. I actually smelled these candles so that you, reader, would not have to. And these are the conclusions I have drawn about what the candles claim to be, and what they actually smell like. Here goes.

Cozy Sweater: Ass.
Autumn Wreath: Spicy ass.
Leather: Sweaty chapped ass. And not the good kind.
Fluffy Towels: Bounce fabric sheets.
Cream Colored Ponies: Sweet Jesus, who thinks of these scents? Another Bounce fabric sheet dipped in vanilla.
Merry Marshmallow: The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after he’s exploded in Ghostbusters.
Mmm, Bacon!: Easily the worst scent of the afternoon. Liquid smoke extract with no hint of pig stuff whatsoever.
Queen Anne’s Lace: What? Queen Anne’s Lace doesn’t even have a scent. If it did, it would be the smell of highway gasoline fumes and burnt-out tires.
Turkey and Stuffing: There was one holiday in which Craig’s mother turned up with a turkey that smelled so rancid I was convinced she’d gotten it by accident from a hospital for turkeys with incurable leprosy. I had to excuse myself from the kitchen and dry-heave in the bedroom, the scent was so awful. It turned out that she’d forgotten to retrieve the plastic bag with the neck and the gizzard from the turkey’s inside before she baked it. This candle smelled worse than that.
Red Velvet: Vanilla.
Shortbread Cookie: Vanilla.
Snowflake Cookie: Vanilla.
Almond Amaretto Biscotti: Vanilla. And ass.
Cherries on Snow: Why in the world would you take your cherries out into a snowstorm, much less leave them there? Are cherries even in season at the same time it snows? Why can’t you just eat your cherries inside and in a bowl or dunked in a nice Cosmo? Get it together, people! Cherry-scented ass.
Patchouli: Hippie ass.
Man Town: Musk, and ass.
First Down: There’s a photo of a football on the jar, but basically it smells like an assy locker room in which everyone has a scorching case of athlete’s foot.
Whiskers on Kittens: Cat ass.
Riding Mower: Grass.
Treehouse Memories: The sweet scent of autumn leaves, mingled with traces of sawdust from the freshly-hewn wood forming the sturdy floor of a child’s treehouse . . . in which someone has let rip an enormous fart.

Don’t thank me. You’re already welcome.