How to Make Your Home Smell Like Christmas

Before buying anything scented, think about the smells you already associate with Christmas.

Not what's currently fashionable in a candle.

What actually makes you think of Christmas?

Mine are very clear: pine, cinnamon, gingerbread, warm amber and baking.

That gives me a scent palette in much the same way that you might choose a colour palette for decorating.

Everything doesn't need to smell identical, but I don't want five completely unrelated fragrances fighting each other either.

A cinnamon candle and real pine can happily exist in the same house. Add gingerbread from the kitchen and everything still belongs to the same story.

That's the principle I use: choose a Christmas scent palette rather than a collection of Christmas scents.

We have several artificial Christmas trees, but I also like having a few small real trees indoors.

And one of the main reasons is the smell.

There is something about real pine that no room spray can completely reproduce. It's fresh and woody and immediately changes how a room feels.

You don't need to replace your artificial tree to get that effect.

A small real tree, fresh greenery or a few real branches can bring that natural pine note into a home that otherwise uses artificial Christmas decorations.

I particularly like the combination because I get the practicality of my artificial trees - which I can decorate exactly as I like - alongside that unmistakable real-tree smell.

I'm not interested in walking from a cinnamon-scented hallway into a pine living room, then vanilla in the bedroom and orange somewhere else.

That's too much fragrance for me.

I prefer scent to drift.

If there's a beautiful candle burning in the living area, you can often smell it elsewhere eventually. A room spray doesn't have to be sprayed into every corner. Baking something in the kitchen will take care of half the house without any help at all.

Give fragrance space to move.

Particularly with stronger Christmas notes like cinnamon, amber and pine, more fragrance doesn't necessarily create more atmosphere.

Sometimes one beautiful scent is enough.

I love a beautiful candle anyway, but Christmas is particularly good candle season.

This is when I like something a little more luxurious - Diptyque is exactly the sort of candle I enjoy at this time of year - with warm, seasonal fragrance and a candlelight glow once it gets dark.

I don't necessarily change the fragrance of the house between morning and evening.

What changes is its intensity.

During the day, the real trees and whatever is happening in the kitchen might be enough. Later, lighting a scented candle makes everything feel warmer.

The fragrance becomes part of the evening in the same way the Christmas lights do.

At our house, those lights are on timers. As soon as it begins to get dark, Christmas starts switching itself on.

Which means I don't really come home to a dark house in December.

The lights are already waiting.

Add a warm cinnamon fragrance when I walk through the door and that's pretty much Christmas to me.

Some of the best Christmas fragrances don't come from anything labelled home fragrance.

They come from the oven.

Baking is absolutely part of how Christmas smells in our house.

Something warm and oat-y baking, gingerbread, spices, coffee - those scents travel naturally from the kitchen into the living room.

And because they come from something actually happening in the house, they feel different from simply spraying another fragrance into the air.

This is one of the reasons I wouldn't try to fragrance every room independently.

A home already has a scent when people are living in it.

Christmas cooking, coffee, a real tree and a candle can do an enormous amount between them.

For a while I had a Philosophy room fragrance with a warm cinnamon-bun sort of scent that I absolutely loved.

There was a matching body wash too.

I couldn't find the home fragrance again last year, which is exactly what seems to happen whenever you discover something that makes your house smell perfect.

But it taught me something useful.

Instead of buying home fragrance simply because the packaging says Christmas, I look for the notes I already know I love.

Cinnamon. Warm spice. Amber. Gingerbread. Pine.

The label matters considerably less than the feeling.

The scent of Christmas doesn't have to stop with the house.

My fragrance preferences change when the weather gets colder too.

This is the season when I reach for perfumes like Kilian Angels' Share, Fugazzi Angel Dust, Phlur Vanilla Skin and Kayali The Wedding Silk Santal.

They aren't all literally Christmas fragrances, nor do they smell identical.

But they occupy a similar world for me: warm, enveloping fragrances that make much more sense when it's cold outside than they do in the middle of summer.

Fragrance becomes another way of changing season.

The house smells warmer. What I'm wearing smells warmer. The lights are warmer. Even the things coming out of the kitchen are warmer.

None of those details has to shout Christmas on its own.

Together, they do.