Midwest Memo
Holiday scents
by Alan Shultz

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas these days. I mean big smell like the way my dresser drawer smelled for years after I spilled the entire contents of a vintage Brute aftershave onto a pile of white socks.

Christmas is in the air all right. It’s hanging in the air like residual exhaust hangs the day after the tractor pull is over. And Santa’s elves are working overtime spreading, sprinkling, powdering, puffing, igniting and planting their merry scents everywhere.

At my office the janitor uses evergreen vacuum powder on the wall-to-wall carpeting. He switched from a pumpkin smelling scent right after Thanksgiving. Every evening he douses the rugs with this powder, then proceeds to vacuum it up. The odor is so strong it’s likely that one morning we will open shop only to find reindeer grazing in our cubicles.

Yesterday I was in the apartment of a guy trying to sell his place for more money than it’s worth. He recently hired a lady called a “stager” to make the place look and feel irresistible to potential buyers. The stager painted a couple of the walls bright colors. She brought in some furniture and plants. Then she set the dining room table with fancy china and put pots on the stove. Finally, she took the place one staging step further. She created what she described to me as an aromatic environment. What that means is the place smells - from every nook and possible cranny, smells wafting at you and around you.

The stager’s smells emit from plug-in devices she has installed in electric outlets throughout the apartment. But these are not cheap, ordinary, grocery store plug-in devices. The gizmos have little fans and they work nonstop spreading their smells throughout the rooms.

“It smells too much,” I told the stager.

I told her that the day before one real estate agent I showed the place to had run out the front door as her allergies to the aromas kicked in. The stager explained to me why I was wrong and that the smells have been scientifically proven to trigger brain endorphin that controls our house-buying mode.

“Really.......” I replied, as a lemony scent told my nostrils to tell my brain to tell my feet to flee out the back door ASAP.

Apparently they haven’t perfected the smell that tells folks to pay too much for a plain Jane apartment that’s all show and no substance. Not yet, anyway, and I wonder what smell that particular aroma would smell like.

Over the weekend my wife and I were out and about running errands. After a solo run into the post office I popped back in the car only to find Santa’s elf had been busy.

“Peppermint?”

It wasn’t so much a question as it was that we had become the essence of peppermint, breathing it, wearing it, licking it as it hung heavy in the very air.

I looked in the back seat to see where 500 lbs. of peppermint could be loaded in a compact car.

“Essential oils,” she replied, “my Yoga instructor sells them. That was just three little drops of the stuff.”

Oh my, I thought to myself as my taste buds signaled my brain to look around the candy shop in which we must certainly be standing.

Now mind you, none of these smells are the real thing. The evergreen, the lemon, the peppermint, they’re all just ode to a chemical concoction.

What’s a fussy nose to do?

So while I crack a window here to get a whiff of the real outdoors, I’m left with one question to ponder.

“Santa does Yoga?”