Take a whiff: fir and pine. Fireplace and campfire. Woodsmoke. Sugar cookies baking in the kitchen. Cinnamon sticks mulling in the warm, spiced wine. Wet dogs, wet wool.
This season is fragrant. Even though Christmas bulbs burn out on the reg, another bulb plays a crucial role in holiday fun: the bulbus olfactorius, olfactory bulb, which facilitates our sense of smell. This bulb, more of a bump, really, versus the flashing red and green kind, is literally essential in forming powerful sensory impressions that form lifelong holiday memories and memories of any season.
This small bulge (8mm long, 4 mm wide) on the underside of the human brain sends signals from receptors in your nose over the river and through the woods, neurally speaking, to the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
Say that three times fast.
But this route of odorant information truly does take us to grandmother’s house, or actually to the dwelling-place of human sensory evolution of many, many grandmas ago. Because of their proximity in the brain’s anatomy, processing areas for smell and memory are closely linked.
The hippocampus functions as a sort of air traffic controller for the onslaught of olfactory news our nostrils gather every second. The hippocampus seems to rank incoming signals according to whether or not the received olfactory impulse is linked with a strong emotion. The information then is sent to the amygdalae, a pair of almond-shaped twins—like in “Mothra”– which process feelings and memory, and this equation is then stored in the brain more or less indefinitely.
This is one of the reasons that the specific aromas of Christmas – sharp, cold, outdoorsy smells like conifer and firewood and cozy culinary perfumes of cooking and baking – are so sentimentally potent. One good inhale, and you’re back in your sticky flannel onesie on a frosty morning long ago, dangerously hopped up on way too many candy canes even though it’s only 6:00 in the AM, blazing away on Guitar Hero while mom and dad stare numbly into space.
Also, curiously, in the aging brain, deeply imprinted scent/emotion pairings may suddenly surface into consciousness after decades of neural silence. Seemingly out of nowhere, an astringent waft of retro Jean Nate drugstore splash takes you back to that idyllic teenage summer in Amagansett or wherever.
Which brings us to pomanders and the making of same. Now that you’re almost out of shopping time, it’s the perfect holiday gift. It’s way cooler than a Starbucks gift card. It’s fragrant and low-tech. It’s centuries old. As far as COG (cost of goods) goes, a box of cloves may run you $5 to $7, which will last indefinitely. We estimate the cost per clove at around 11 cents. The citrus may be free, depending upon what grows in your yard. It’s also a great activity to do with kids, especially since it’s messy (meaning=fun), and they get to create a useful, unusual present in less than 30 minutes.
A Brief History of the Pomander
The word “pomander” is a slurred form of pomme d’ambre, or apple made of ambergris. If you don’t already know the origins of ambergris, you may not want to know.
Pomanders were fragranced accessories that became hugely popular in medieval times well into the Renaissance in Europe, where they were used in hopes of deflecting plague as well as just simply killing the collective stench of livestock, chronically unbathed human bodies, and the daily business of thousands of chamber-pots being dumped from the nearest window.
Many pomanders also were religious objects and contained pilgrim’s medals, reliquary venerations (you know, a fragment of a saint’s finger, that kinda stuff) and other talismans as well as aromatics. These aromatics and their fixatives were often animal-based, as is the case with ambergris, simply because animal funk is more permeating and long-lasting than botanical scents. If you’ve ever driven cross-country with a dog, you know.
Another fan fave in terms of pomander-blending back when the world was lit only by fire was civet musk. And as with ambergris, don’t ask, don’t tell. Suffice it to say that collecting ambergris is illegal in the USA, and collecting civet musk is a task performed elsewhere under brutally inhumane conditions—ask any civet. Have you ever taken your dog to have its anal glands expressed? ’Nuff said.
Then there’s deer musk. Suffice it to say that six of the seven musk-producing deer species are listed as endangered.
Luckily for these critters, passable synthetics have been developed and now take their place in the majority of perfumes and fragranced products in the modern world.
In London in 1586, John Partridge wrote in his compendium “The Treasury of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets” that these beastly ingredients were whipped up with tree resins, warmed in a pan over a flame, shaped into a ball, then rolled in crushed cinnamon and cloves. The cured, aromatic ball was then carried in a decorative, pierced metal holder and often worn as a pendant at the waist or around the neck.
Our holiday craft version
Ours is considerably simpler, using a citrus fruit as the basis for the pomme d’ambre. This version became popular around the time of Partridge’s book publication, when oranges and cloves, although still considered luxury items in Europe, became more available than in times past.
A fossil record from Lincang, Yunnan, China, reveals an 8-million-year-old specimen of an orange circa the late Miocene era (11.6 to 5.3 million years ago).
It’s now an accepted scientific fact that all citrus fruit originated in the southeast Himalayan foothills, and some of the earliest names for the orange, such as nurga and nārańga, are from Tamil, Sanskrit and Persian dialects and often translate as “fragrant.”
Hybridized “trade oranges” (Citrus sinensis) were cultivated in northeast India and China during the Han Dynasty circa 220-206 BCE, reaching southern Italy by the 10th and 11th centuries CE, the Caribbean by the 15th century, and England and Germany by the 16th century.
We now take those bags of freeway oranges for granted but receiving an orange in a Christmas stocking any time prior to about 1950 was, in fact, an exotic splurge.
Cloves, the dried flower buds of an evergreen tree, originated in the Molucca Islands of Indonesia. The slightly numbing quality of their oil is the result of a substance called eugenol, used for millennia as a topical antiseptic and anesthetic. And, oil of clove is still sold as an OTC treatment for dental pain.
Cloves reached Europe by the 8th century CE, where they hit the nail on the head, so to speak, with God-fearing Christians who associated the nail-like shape of the clove as well as the pungent aroma with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, respectively. These associations made the modern pomander, an orange pierced with cloves, a symbol of everlasting life as well as a way to offset the aroma of simply being medieval.
Here’s what you need:
- Sharpie
- Orange, lemon or lime
- Cloves
- A tool with a sharp metal point – cocktail pick, steel BBQ skewer
- Straight pins, dressmaker’s pins (the latter have a glass ball at the end)
- Decorative cord or ribbon
Here’s how to do it:
- Using the Sharpie, make rows of dots to mark a pattern on your fruit. Simple lines work best. Leave a little space between the dots.
- Use the metal tool to pierce several holes in the rind. A clove will fill each hole. Of course, when crafting with little ones, big hands need to make these holes.
- Note that everyone’s hands will get sticky.
- Do one row of holes at a time rather than puncturing your entire lemon, orange or lime all at once.
- Insert a clove into the hole you just made. Repeat.
- Complete one row—Sharpie dots, then holes, then cloves – before moving on to the next row.
- If the whole thing gets too juicy and sticky, wipe everything off with a Windex-ed paper towel.
- Make a bow at the end of a 12″ ribbon or cord
- Attach cord to pomander using 2-3 straight pins
Et voila! The pomander will scent a closet or dresser-drawer for months before it resembles a shrunken head.
