Perfume Diary: Holiday Party Mystery Punch (HF)

At this time of year I miss drinking the most. The holiday season doesn’t feel quite like itself, quite sparkly enough or special enough, and I am reaching for some artificial way to to crank up the whole music box carousel of December in New York. This is the season of artifice, and that’s the magic of it. There’s nothing natural on offer; the light makes the PC-computer shut-down noise at 4pm and falls out of the sky, and the cold strips color and ease from the outdoors. So we make our own light, and color, and miracles. It is a season of desperate artifice, of invention, a season for try-hards, for asks, for risking it all. We buy trees that someone else cut down somewhere far away; we string up inconvenient, childlike lights in our homes; we drag pine-smelling shedding greenery up our staircases and into our living rooms. We crowd into bars and parties and restaurants and smile too much and laugh too loudly. We light up the darkness, warm over-stuffed windows making constellations in the cold. 

And we drink, or I do, or I used to. Drinking is obvious in winter, part of the mythology of the festive; it is cold outside, but alcohol makes us warm inside. Catch a glass of champagne (or any cheap bubbly beverage) in the right golden light and it looks like stars, as though you took the string lights that go around Christmas trees and over windows and doorways, and suspended them in a slim glass. A few year ago, on the Friday before Christmas, that day when a large number of people are done with having to go into the office for the year, the holy festival of the out-of-office email auto-responder, I met my husband at a bar just beyond Times Square before going to see a Broadway show — that’s another thing about this time of year, it encourages everybody to be tourists, foolish and profligate and celebratory and willing to go to Times Square on a Friday night — and, in one fluid motion with walking into the bar and sitting down, ordered a martini and a medium-rare steak and it felt perhaps the most exactly like the holidays that it ever has. We swanned out into the night an hour later, woozy and listing side to side, battling tour-bus groups in Christmas sweaters, full and warm-hearted and unfazed. Everywhere something twinkled; everything was a friendly blur, as though the whole world were drunk with us. 

People make punches this time of year, great bowls of ill-considered bad decision juice at parties. When I was growing up, for a few years my family threw huge Christmas parties and my dad made an eggnog that was lethally alcoholic, barely any cream and barely smelling like eggnog, since the gleam of alcohol nearly drowned out the smell of cinnamon. People in crowded apartments stick cloves in oranges and drown them in wine, leave them on the stove and forget about them, or stink up the house and make something that everyone knows tastes bad but everyone drinks anyway. It’s a time for not asking questions or thinking too hard, a time for too much all at once. The year is nearly over; if we were going to be good we already would have been, and if we were going to save ourselves, we already would have done so. We might as well get drunk on whatever punch is at the party, on the heaviest glass of red wine we can pour, on the bracing martini at the bar on a Friday that feels like school just got out, and like we have been set free into the unsupervised ground floor of the year. 

I stopped drinking because I stopped enjoying it, and I wouldn’t enjoy it now if I started again, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss all of these things. One of fragrance’s best functions, I think, is to act as halfway comfort for this sort of longing, a way to artificially return to the things we miss desperately without actually wanting them back. Slumberhouse’s Baque, which I’ve been wearing all week despite it being such a strong, overwhelmingly dark and sweet and heavy scent that I want to apologize to the people around me when I wear it, smells like holiday drinking. It smells exactly like the thing that I miss, the fragrant, heady, fruity, highly suspicious mystery punch at a raucous holiday party. It smells like a bad choice, and it smells like the reason we make them, like the appeal of sinking into a long, strange night.

But it also smells very specifically like the holidays, shot through with a loud apricot note, fruity but more like the fruit in a Northern Renaissance painting where all the fruit is a metaphor for the transience of earthly pleasures than like a tropical vacation. Baque is a smell about the dead of winter, a smell that instantly summons up the cold, an icy night hissing at the windows. It smells incredibly warm, but it is warm in a defensive way, heavy wood and leather and tobacco and parchment muffling the licentious vanilla notes. It smells like old money, like rooms built to withstand cold. If you saw Knives Out, it smells exactly how I imagine the house in that movie smells. If you’re me, that means it’s an ideal cold-weather fragrance, but maybe look up images from that movie if you haven’t seen it and if you’re not sure how much of a winter drama queen you really are.

Baque smells like a party and like a warning, which is to say it smells like the brightly lit and death-riddled season at the end of the year. It smells like getting drunk at somebody else’s office party. It smells like a bunch of people who just graduated from college deciding they’re going to learn to make mulled wine this year, I mean how hard can it be. It smells like the holiday parties my family threw when I was very young, when I first became aware that grown-ups could do stupid things and make themselves loudly and publicly foolish. It smells like the hopeful, guilty sense of a heavy indoors that cuts through a very cold night. It is a deeply winter perfume; I couldn’t imagine wearing it in any other season. But if you want to indulge in all the drowning warmths of winter, if you want to smell like the house in a murder mystery and like the vast, lurid, slightly sinister fruit-laden table in an oil painting, and also like the exact center of a holiday party, then this is the fragrance for you this winter, generating your own trail of radiant, booze-soaked heat through the cold. I might have a drink tomorrow, but I might just wear this again instead. It would be almost the same. —HF