Christmas smells

I just read my first Christmas Story of the season to my children. I tripped into the attic to extract the overly heavy box. It was dusty. It smelled weird like sweaty, heated paper, with a hint of stale nail polish. But, the familiarity of the books themselves remind me of the smell of cinnamon which will forever be remind me of my mother. And the pictures on the covers reminded me of, the laughing of my seven siblings as we sang goofy (total hacks on the classic) Christmas carols. And the smell of heated bodies ripe for the shower mingled with pull apart bread my mother baked.
There is something about Christmas that makes my heart a bit tight. Not in the Grinch sort of way, I don't consider my heart two sizes to small. No there is a longing so dear, and a need too great-- a soft melancholy catches me off guard every year, while I try to recreate the perfect Christmas of my memory, which is more imagination then reality. The Spirit of Christmas is exacerbated by my desire to do more than is humanly possible. This desire to do more be more is at its best and worst.
My children all said:
Christmas smells like bacon cooking in the morning, or sausage added by Dallin. (Carter)
Sugar and Cinnamon, with licking your buttered fingers after a batch of pull aparts. (Kelly)
Funny, it feels like it smells like pine trees, but I know we have a fake tree! (Jonathan)
I think Christmas smells musty like a closed container, then comes to life when it hears the sounds of children's delighted squeals, and drums, horns, strings from the glorious Christmas music, and more to life when we say things like, "remember when" and "I remember that".
I think it smells too sweet till you look at the pictures from last year and then know that not a single moment was too much, and there were several that just weren't enough.
the smell of Christmas is more a feeling then an actual olfactory sensation-- its like a memory you start in your mouth.