When I was growing up in Trinidad, Christmas was a special time for my family. There was always a lot of excitement in the air. It was the time of year when we get a lot of new stuff and we’d spend time visiting with friends and family.

A big part of the Christmas culture in Trinidad is singing Parang, a type of Spanish folk music which originated in Venezuela and Colombia. Groups of people with rudimentary instruments went from house to house singing these Spanish songs. The term Parang is also colloquial for “we’re going to visit houses” which in turn meant homes were spruced up with fresh paint, polished wooden floors and new curtains.

It’s the smells of Christmas that I remember most vividly. I have very early scent memories that go back to being 5-6 years old. The scent memory was a series of smells that together told me it was Christmas time in Trinidad.

FRESH PAINT

The first scent is the smell of fresh paint. Every year around Christmas it was a tradition to repaint your house. If not your entire house, then at least certain areas of the house. It was mostly the inside that was painted. Outside painting happened less frequently. There were four of us kids in the house, so you can imagine the walls got dirty.

My dad was one of those people who thought you could teach a kid to do anything. You just have to show them how. As the oldest, I had to learn to paint. I was very involved with the painting. That’s one of the smells that to this day reminds me of Christmas. And I can remember two types of paint. There was the oil based paint and the water based paint. The way I could tell them apart was through the smell.

FLOOR POLISH

Then there’s the smell of floor polish. Our house had wooden floors and it was very common to polish the floors for Christmas. We had this little machine that we’d use to polish the floors. It had interchangeable bristles - 3 circular bristles - under the machine. There were polishing bristles and shining bristles. The polish was liquid, held in a container with a string you had to pull to let the polish liquid pour out onto the floor. The machine with its polishing brushes rolled over the liquid to spread it on the floors before drying. You’d switch the brushes out depending on whether you were polishing or shining the floor.

Most often my parents would do the polishing and us kids did the shining. You had to get to a certain age to be able to do the polishing. I couldn’t wait to polish. So to this day the smell of the floor polish takes me back to Christmas in Trinidad. If I had to describe the smell of the floor polish, I’d say it was leathery, patchouli, petroleum, balsamic, dark, leathery for sure.

NEW CURTAINS

There was also the smell of new curtains. My mom often got new fabric curtains which had a very particular smell. And she also got new shower curtains in the bathroom which had a beach ball like smell. You had to have a new shower curtain in the bathroom for Christmas.

FOOD

Lastly, there was the smell of food. I grew up on a farm with livestock and short term crops so there was plenty of food. At Christmas, my parents made a big deal out of the dinner. Every year they’d make homemade ham for Christmas which we still make to this day.

There’s two aspects to making the ham. First, they’d mix up a liquid and inject it into the pork, and then there’s this curing salt that they rubbed on the ham. If I smell that aroma in a fragrance it takes me back to Christmas and eating that ham. If I had to describe the smell, it’s a pungent, clovey, spicey, slightly medicinal smell. Those were the types of smells that came from the ham that my dad made for Christmas.

All of these smells of Christmas make me feel happy. We were able to make our place nice, and we were able to spend time with our family and friends who’d come over. So those smells make me happy and make me reflect on my childhood, my family and my friends.

When I smell any of these scents today, it definitely brings back memories of those times. It brings back the feeling of wanting to go back to those days, when the biggest worry was learning my math tables. I wish I could go back to those days.

If the scent had a sound, what would it be? For me the paint is loud and the floor polish has a low vibration. I think of the whole smell of Christmas in Trinidad like the sound of Parang, which we always listened to at Christmas. And I associate those smells with that music.

If the scent had a color, what would it be? Dark blue. Mostly because there was a lot of blue on the outside of our house and Christmas happened in that house. The Christmas smells are dark blue.

If the scent had a texture, what would it be? Rough. There are so many contrasting aspects of the smell of Christmas. But it definitely has sharp edges.

If the scent could give you advice, what would it tell you? It would tell me to savor the moment. It would tell me to be more conscientious about what I was smelling at the time. It would tell me to share my thoughts with someone and maybe write them down. That’s what it would tell me.