All I Want For Christmas is You (And These Gifts)

The grinch whizzed down Mt. Crumpit with a sleigh full of gifts for the Whos, but I prefer this little car.

If I were in charge of buying my own gifts, without a spending limit, anything here would be perfect. Although as alluring as all these are, I’d be happy with a bag of Chicken Bones cinnamon candies (see below.)

The evil geniuses at Chanel have turned their Les Exclusifs Sycomore, the greatest vetiver fragrance ever (as I wrote about here) into a lush Body Oil, ($140, Chanel.com.) A little different from the perfume (I swear the forward-facing vanilla and cedar give the oil a ‘skin scent’ quality) it’s still a smoky, vegetal and earthy declaration of vetiver brilliance.

With jojoba and meadowfoam seed oil, it’s a dry oil that sinks right in, leaving you smelling like perfume royalty. This kind of extravagance doesn’t come cheap, but it’ll turn your morning and evening skincare into a heady paradise every time.

Our new apartment comes with a rather complicated electric fireplace insert that I am shamefully afraid to switch on.

While I work up the courage to dive into the byzantine instruction manual, I will, in the interim, ask Santa for this extra large, multi-wicked Diptyque Feu de Bois Candle ($297, Holt Renfrew) with its incredibly evocative, room-filling wood fire scent and its beautiful greige ceramic vessel.

It’s quite sad how badly I dress. I don’t care nearly enough, and more often than not, I will look down and see that I’m wearing terrible jeans and an ancient, lint-flecked sweater. So I try to carry a nice bag and wear my late mother’s jewelry to distract from the untidiness of my hair, the weird fit of my Nordstrom Rack jeans.

A Sidney Garber Scribble scribble ring ($10,900 US sidneygarber.com) with its six conjoined sparkly bands is the perfect attention-getting diversion. It would stand out beautifully against a plain black sweater with black trousers and some glossy lug-soled chunky loafers, and no other jewelry. I could manage that, I think.

A casually draped sheepskin is a clever solution if the cat has clawed an arm rest, or shredded an ottoman. And you can get a perfectly credible, if rather smallish, one, at IKEA any day of the week.

But for a real splash, I would love a curly, smoke-grey Gotland sheepskin, ($553, blacksheepwhitelight.com) from Canadian online retailer Black Sheep White Light. And here’s a rationalization for you: it’s cheaper than paying for reupholstery.

Ganong Chicken Bones are a Canadian east coast Christmas candy dating back to 1885, even though they seem faintly Mexican in origin, given their singular mix of cinnamon candy with a chocolate filling.

Hard to come by, but worth hunting down here in Ontario, I had to order mine online this year, but luckily Sobey’s carries them, $7, Voila.ca. (As does Amazon.)

Chanel Paris-Paris is Sunny and Dirty

As any Parisian woman worth her Isabel Marant boots will tell you, it’s imperfection - a larger nose, charmingly crooked teeth - that elevates a conventionally pretty face to truly beautiful. It’s the same in fashion. Adding something old and beat-up, or sentimental or just plain offspeed to your outfit ensures you still look like you and that you didn’t just buy your whole ensemble straight off the store mannequin.

Chanel’s latest ‘Les Eaux’ Paris-Paris abides by this unspoken rule as well. It has a quiet, unexpected edge that is ineffably, truly Parisian, because the real Paris isn’t only those endless perfect cups of coffee on marble tables that you see on Instagram. The real Paris can actually be pretty gritty - the traffic, jostling with a sea of humanity in the Metro, inhaling diesel fumes belched from trucks as you sit in a boulevard café - and it’s that contrast that Paris-Paris embodies. It’s a rose scent, but it is much more than yet another rose scent.

Paris-Paris opens like a light, summery fragrance. There’s freshness courtesy of citrus and pink pepper and damascena rose, bright but still plush. But give it a minute and there’s a surprisingly insistent patchouli rumbling away underneath, adding a whisper of (and I really hate to use this word in case it gets misconstrued) ‘dirty’ to that bright rose. It’s the perfect alluring scent for a languorous dinner — one those evenings spent around the table for hours, while the candles gutter and dessert is long finished. Paris-Paris is earthy, but it’s quietly, discreetly earthy. Not quite unwashed, but it definitely alludes to the human animal wearing it.

So whether you read Paris-Paris as light and unimpeachably daytime chic or as more of an evening fragrance, consider it your summer-in-the-city scent that will easily go into fall and beyond.

Let’s Keep Chanel Cuir de Russie Our Secret

Chanel Cuir de Russie, photographed against a sweater because it is the most luxurious #sweaterweatherperfume ever.

With all this (social) distance, some of us have been ‘free pouring’ our perfume to make a big olfactory statement. Forget that ‘your fragrance should only be detectable by your lover in your arms’ nonsense. We need scent that can be smelled across a room and through a mask, and perfume houses have obliged with ever-bigger smoky, leathery fragrances (Tom Ford’s new Ebène Fumé is selling out everywhere) that are as brash and aggressive as a banker bro loudly ordering ‘top shelf’ vodka shots in a noisy bar.

But the perfect bold leather-and-woods scent already exists and surprise - it’s from 1927.

Les Exclusifs de Chanel Cuir de Russie, (75 ml, edp $250 CAN) is a velvety, smoky dream created by Ernest Beaux to sate Madame Chanel’s obsession with all things Russian. In addition to birch tar (that ‘Russian leather’ note) it packs in musks, woods and smoke all encircling a very Chanel-esque rose and jasmine heart. (Ernest Beaux, after all, created Chanel No 5 six years earlier.)

If you’re going to spring for one Verdura Maltese cross, you might as well get two. (This pair actually belonged to Mme. Chanel herself.)

It’s arguably a men’s fragrance for women, although what does ‘unisex’ even mean anymore? Cuir de Russie would be equally at home on a gentleman in a Charvet shirt or a woman who pushes up the sleeves of her Chanel jacket to show off twin Verdura Maltese cross bracelets. But you can just wear it with your athleisure and marvel as it makes you unconsciously put your shoulders back and stand straighter than any Pilates class ever could.

And unlike formerly niche scents (remember when Le Labo Santal 33 went from cool to over-exposed?) you still don’t smell Cuir de Russie everywhere. It has maintained its ‘deep cut’ status. So if you buy it and someone asks what you’re wearing, just fib, ok?

You Always Remember Your First Chanel

Photo: Janine Falcon

This ancient, scratched-up Chanel No 5 spray wasn’t always mine. It belonged to a girl I never met, who roomed with my best friend at college in New England in a typical, off-campus student house with mismatched furniture and an emptyish fridge. The house was owned by Kevin, a towering, affable guy who managed the town’s coat hanger factory, which is psychically as far away as you can get from the most expensive college in the US.

One time I was visiting and nosing around in the bathroom for toothpaste, I saw something that seemed completely out of place. Trying to sound casual, I said to Kevin “there’s Chanel No 5 in the medicine cabinet.”

“Oh. That must have been Charlotte’s,” he said. “She moved out. You can have it.”

Who leaves Chanel behind? My best guess is someone who already has a lot of Chanel or unfettered access to more Chanel. This was unfathomable to 20-year-old, poor student me. This abandoned bottle was almost half full and I wouldn’t have been any more surprised to find a Fabergé egg or a diamond bracelet.

I shouldn’t have been. The girls who attended this college were very fancy, but hid it under baggy sweaters and thrifted jeans. My friend explained that back home they had “long driveways” which was her oblique way of saying that their (rich) families lived in enormous houses, set so far back from the road that they weren’t visible to passersby.

I took the bottle, obviously. It was impossible to pretend I didn’t want it. Thirty-five years later I have a lot of perfume (none of it nicked from other people’s bathrooms, by the way.) And even though it’s always been rather banged up, I continued to buy refills for Charlotte’s bottle. The fact that this style and size is still available speaks volumes about the endurance of Chanel.

It now lives on my dresser, beside an even older No 5 bottle that belonged to my mother. It’s not called hoarding when it’s Chanel, right?