Christmas scents

What are your favourite Christmas memories?

My memories connect to atmosphere and aroma. Even now when I experience those smells I comfortably return to my childhood Christmases.

For me, Christmas aromas are connected to gardens and kitchens. The smells of sweet peas, jasmine, freesia, wisteria and hyacinth lazily carried on balmy summer air return me to the small 1970s Barossa town of my childhood.

To a growing anticipation and excitement, a free-flowing family busyness that wasn’t tethered, burdened or resented but carried feelings of relaxed anticipation and delight.

Christmas was coming. We were preparing. We were all working toward something good, where even mundane cleaning chores were a little more endurable. Even meaningful. Those Christmases were community projects, not arrays of consumer products.

It was the same with the smells that wafted from our kitchen. Cinnamon and apple, baked honey and ginger biscuits and, when Christmas finally arrived, the rich aromas of lavish roasts and puddings whose flavours never quite ended.

The Christmas aromas of my childhood impacted time itself as they signalled changed routines. With those smells the ordinary things of our lives were paused as we set time aside to connect with each other in special ways around family, food (fellowship), and faith all nested within their glorious fragrances.

Our Christmas festival didn’t need embellishing with burdensome shopping. The three Fs were enough and, when practiced simply and with grace, Christmas was alive. It was almost impossible to be disappointed. If there was any disappointment it was when our focus shifted from the three fs and curled inwardly on ourselves.

I’m a long way away from my childhood, but even now Christmas aromas quickly return me to that place, and in that place my other sense memories erupt as I search and wonder who and what family, food and faith might be in this moment.

From the perspective of my Christian faith, these whimsical questions reflect the heart of the Christmas event. Christmas is not about what we make certain and the limits that we impose, as though it’s yet another carefully designed form of self-expression.

It’s about being gloriously carried by the story itself, never knowing exactly how and where it might land because it comes to us, not from us. Like signposts, the smells, sights, sounds, tastes and sensations simply remind us that it’s here and we are in it. It is for us.

At the first Christmas an angel spoke to fringe dwelling shepherds and said, “don’t be afraid. I’m here to announce a great and joyful event that is meant for everybody, worldwide: a Saviour (a changemaker) has just been born,” (Luke 2:10). Time stood still, and those shepherds’ senses must have exploded as they went and met the infant Jesus.

What sights, smells and sounds in later years would have triggered their glorious memories, realising that this child was born for them? The change, lives that deeply mattered to God, was for them and for all people. That’s where the three Fs landed them.

Thanks for sharing the Southbank neighbourhood with us at St Johns throughout this past year. Being part of this diverse community enriches us. God’s peace, presence and protection be with you throughout this Christmas and New Year season. •