HGTV's Erin Napier Has The Perfect Scent For Your Home This Holiday Season
For many, the holidays bring about memories of childhood, whether reading stories in front of the fireplace or getting dressed up for holiday gatherings. Yet, scent is a powerful component of memories, too. A simple scent can trigger a long-forgotten memory in just a moment. HGTV's Erin Napier has strong memories tied to the scent of cloves and oranges, which is the inspiration behind her new holiday-themed candle called "Season of Hope."
Napier's Scent Library, a line of candles launched in November 2022, is an effort that has grown over the last year. The message behind the candle is quite touching. For Napier, the candle brings up memories spent with her mother during the holidays. She recently shared those meaningful memories and touching thoughts in an Instagram post. Her post includes the new scent along with some treasured photos of her mother's home over the years. It's quite the nostalgic scene, with stockings hung on a mantle over a burning fire and soft lighting to set the tone. While some people in the comments thought they were looking at the inside of Napier's house, the reality of it being her mother's home over several seasons makes it a bit more magical.
A scent inspired by oranges and cloves
In her November Instagram post, Erin Napier inquired, "Do you find that no matter what you do to make Christmas magic for your family as an adult, the best and strongest memories and magic are still at your mama's house? Did you make pomanders at Christmas when you were a kid? It's a powerful scent memory for me—the whole cloves my mama and I would stick into the navel oranges and stack them in a tower that looked like a tree."
Pomanders are a tradition in some areas. People would come together with nothing but oranges and whole cloves to create beautiful, sometimes elaborate displays for holiday tables. In the 13th century, the tradition was to carry them around with you, like a necklace, to ward off illness and germs. But by the 18th century, they served only as decorative and fragrant ornaments. Today, cloves are popped into oranges in various configurations, beautiful star shapes, or unique patterns — there's no real right or wrong design. The scent is immediately pungent — a combination of the sweet citrus with the intense burst of cloves. Stacked in a pyramid shape — on a cake pedestal or in a fruit bowl — pomanders create a striking visual display on a holiday table. Napier adds in her post, "[Citrus and clove] was a scent I only experienced in December, and so it became the fragrance of feeling safe, warm, and happy at home."
The launching of a new candle scent shares those memories
To pay homage to those memories, Erin Napier joined forces with the Salvation Army. On her Instagram, she shares, "For this year's special edition @scentlibrary.lmco candle, we are partnering with the @salvationarmyus to raise awareness to help families who are struggling to make ends meet this holiday season." The candles, made at their factory in Laurel, Mississippi, are available on the Scent Library website for $28, as well as at Dillard's locations around the country. In 2016, Napier launched The Laurel Candle, a handcrafted, American-made candle that she believed smelled like the community of Laurel. That candle was the initial start of something much larger. After renovating an old storefront in the community, she, along with her husband and partner Ben, launched The Scent Library, a location dedicated to the power of scent memories.
Those scent memories are perfectly displayed in the new candle scent, "Seasons of Hope. Napier also shared in her post, "It is the smell of a zingy navel orange and spicy clove, and it makes my heart feel full with childhood Christmas magic." For Napier, this may be one of her favorite memory scents, but for any homeowner, the best candle scents can bring up memories or exude fragrances that inspire thoughts, feelings, or emotions of all types. Candles are also a beautiful way to decorate your home, especially with a few decorative candle holders to display them.