Christmas time is as much about smells as experiences: the minty aroma of a just-licked candy cane, boughs of pine wafting their wintery bouquet throughout the house, cinnamon sticks perfuming the pot of warm apple cider that simmers on the stove. No doubt about it, smells can evoke strong memories of Christmases past.

For me, the smells of Christmas past aren’t quite so idealized, however. In fact, there’s one distinctive odor that always harkens me back to Christmases of yore, but this odor is not one you’d like to capture in a bottle for memories’ sake. You see, when I recall the Christmas Days of my youth, burnished foremost into my brain are recollections of being trapped in the back seat of our Custom Cruiser station wagon en route to my grandparents’ house, with a perpetually-flatulent brother poised to strike every 5 minutes for the duration of the 2-hour drive.

I was always stuck next to him in the middle seat—you remember, the one with the hump at your feet, which forced you to keep your knees jammed up against your chin, so that every pothole that the car hit caused cranial injuries. It was one of those older cars, where you had to crank the window down by hand. Being western Pennsylvania, it was bitterly cold most Christmases. Which meant that if said gaseous brother was courteous enough to actually lower the window after stinking up the car, he was also inclined out of spite to keep it down until my tears froze on my face from the lashing Siberian wind.

There was no chance of getting that window back up until dad—busy with the job of chain-smoking Viceroy 100’s up front–pulled out the big guns and threatened my brother with one of those hairbrush spankings we all feared. What with the fraternal rotten egg smell, the enveloping fug of smoky gray haze pouring forth from dad’s cancer sticks, and the painfully depressing sounds of dad’s favorite, the Montavani String Orchestra, butchering Christmas tunes on our tinny-sounding AM-only radio, I was assured that the ghosts of Christmases past were doomed to haunt me well into adulthood.

Year in, year out, Christmas day was the same. First, tear through Santa’s bountiful gifts. Next, dress up in our Sunday best for what felt like an eternity of solemn fidgeting at church. Then pile into the car for our annual Christmas Day dilemma: stay warm, while silently being sickened by the toxic flow of fetid odors emanating from my brother’s seat, or suffer the Dr. Zhivago-like frigid chill of driving across the tundra to Altoona, PA, with all the windows open. Once we got there, it was nothing but fun, but the torture we had to endure to get to our destination was almost more than I could bear. By the time we arrived, our olfactory systems had endured such trauma we could no longer smell the Christmas turkey or even the wafting aroma of my grandmother’s freshly-baked pies.

Years of intensive olfactory therapy have allowed me to laugh at those stinky treks to my grandparents’ house each Christmas. I do feel a little sorry for my brother’s wife and kids, who eventually became the unwitting victims of his gaseous fury.

Imagine my delight when I learned recently that generations of siblings to come will be spared the gruesome car rides of my childhood. You see, last year when my family gathered for Christmas, my oldest brother graced our smelly sibling with the ultimate in personalized gifts, in homage to our years of suffering at his hands (or rather, his volatile bowels). He gave him a pair of boxer shorts equipped with replaceable charcoal filters, to keep those silent but deadly odors from wafting beyond the borders of his drawers. Technology to the rescue! Oh, to have had this back in the good old days. 

Happy Holidays!

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I’m happy to have author Melissa Clark visiting with me today. The genesis of her very successful debut novel Swimming Upstream Slowly came about in a really funny way.

“The idea was born because I was having lunch with a friend and overate,” she says. “I lifted my shirt to expose my bloated belly and the friend said, half joking, ‘Are you sure you’re not pregnant?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, right, from a lazy sperm.’ I went home that night and started outlining the idea for a movie. I decided, eventually, to write it as a novel instead.”

Need I say more? Please welcome Melissa Clark…

I always hate those articles that urge you to make your holiday gifts this year. For all the extra gifts you need–for the ChemLawn guy, say, or the UPS delivery person–why not make gingered violets, or better yet, home-made candy canes?

 What self-respecting person wouldn’t want to receive these, and what self-flagellating person wouldn’t go on a bender and actually make them? It means so much more, it’ll save you money. You’ll be the hit of the party!

When my kids were young and needed constant entertainment I had the brilliant idea to follow Martha Stewart’s sage (the adjective, not the herb) advice and create our very own cranberry wreath: an inspired mother-children bonding project that was bound to keep us all enthralled for hours.

Usually leery of Martha’s advice, I knew this project would be a breeze. I mean, how hard could it be to jab cranberries into Styrofoam?

I made an extra trip to the store, three small kids in tow, to buy our supplies; figured we’d make two wreaths, since we’d be having so much fun. So I bought eight bags of berries, and a few boxes of toothpicks (all I could find were the colored plastic ones, but they’d do in a pinch).

Add the wreaths, which cost a couple of bucks–not to mention a few gray hairs caused by dragging the kids to the craft store for one measly thing, for which I had to wait in an endless line, because, being the holiday season, every fool decided they too had a hidden craft gene in them –and we were good to go.

Soon, we’d have a gorgeous crimson festive decorator showpiece to hang from our front door, made by the creative little hands of my babies, all for under thirty bucks!

Back home, I ambitiously invited my nephews to join in the fun. So our craft team consisted of five kids aged five and under.

If my memory serves correctly, this project held these kids’ interest for, oh, say, three minutes and twelve seconds. For the subsequent hour that ensued, I cajoled, implored then forced the kids to persist. I’d be damned if my financial investment and good intentions were gonna be lost without a fight. Plus, I had no alternative activity with which to divert their attention.

Apart from the usual arguing over who got what cranberry and the best colored toothpicks, I had to contend with five out of control children dropping a myriad of deadly toothpicks all over the floor for the toddlers in the crowd to then pick up and stuff into a variety of orifices.

The floor-bound cranberries, which were most of them, were eaten by my mooch of a dog, who ended up throwing them back up in a seasonally brilliant vermilion color. Crushed berries stained my porous teak table.

By project’s end–which was when the oldest of the group (the others having given up much earlier and taken to running amok in my house) could no longer bear the pain of the pointy sticks in their fingertips–I was left with two pathetic Styrofoam rings, smashed cranberries jabbed randomly across their topography.

Do you know how many millions of cranberries it must take to cover a foam wreath? And how much resistance the foam puts up to any attempt to puncture its tough exterior wall?

What I had before me were vast expanses of white foam with vague hints of holiday red. Definitely not meant to grace my front door.

Trying to salvage something from this failed venture, I decided to hang the wreaths from a tree; at least the wintering birds would enjoy the berries.

I soon learned that while no local birds gave a hoot about cranberries, strong winds and foul weather would do wonders to facilitate the dropping of hundreds of non-biodegradable toothpicks, which littered my yard mockingly. All year long, those colored little sticks strewn all over my front lawn served as a reminder of my folly.

      The next year, I took my money from the craft budget, picked up a pizza, rented a movie for the kids, and ordered all those extra gifts by phone. I learned my lesson, the hard way.