Faunalia

Held on December 5th, this is the festival of the Horned God of the Forest, one of the di indigetes of Rome, god of cattle, fertility, wild, untamed nature, and prophecy through dreams. The scent of a thick, starlit, unspoiled forest, with a burst of wild musk, opobalsamum, black bryony, mandragora, and hemlock.

Opiate Southern Gardens of Orchids

This scent is part of the 2013 series Misketonic Valley Yuletide: The Festival and just so I still have this text when the series is no longer available I shall copy it and paste it below.

The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

Buried in the echoes of time immemorial is the Miskatonic Valley rite of the Festival. While the origins are lost in space and time, our holiday customs have been memorialized through oral tradition and the eons-long observation of our rituals, year after year.

So, don your holiday ritual robes, grab your discordant flutes, hop on your limply-flopping demon mounts, take a swig of goat milk cocoa, and head down to the Stygian grotto to join the villagers of Kingsport as they observe the time-worn traditions of the Festival. Celebrate the season the Miskatonic Valley way!

Refreshments provided by Arkham’s own Mother Shub and Zadok Allen Vineyard.

Happy Yule, Kingsport!

If you would like to read H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Festival" you can find it here.

I ordered only one decant from this series and I don't really remember why I ordered it. I do know that I had forgotten that most Miskatonic Valley scents are, for obvious reasons, aquatics. And aquatics and I are not the best friends, so had I remembered I might not even have ordered this one. And missed an aquatic scent that I do like. The flavour text is the following:

"Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember."

The scent is described as: "Memories of alien gardens that crawl with wide swaths of vivid, soporific blossoms: gargantuan orchids, blood-purple poppies, and monstrous black peonies."

I can't say that I smell orchids, or poppies, or even peonies which I should be able to recognize from other BPAL scents that I have. I'll have to wear it more often, and I even considered buying a bottle, until I saw how many bottles I already have. What I could smell today was an aquatic floral scent that I much enjoyed.

 

El Día de los Reyes 2013

"The Day of Kings, the Celebration of the Magi. In Mexico, on January 6th, children place their shoes by their windows. If they have been good during the previous year, the Wise Men tuck gifts into their shoes during the night.”

This is much like our Dutch celebration of Sinterklaas at December 5th. One generation before me children placed their shoes at the chimney and if they had been good Sinterklaas would fill the shoes with gifts. But when homes had less and less working chimneys this changed into the gifts appearing in a different way on the evening of the 5th of December.

Scentwise, El Día de los Reyes is a Black Phoenis Alchemy Lab scent that appears for the third time in the Yule release.  I did not have a chance to try the 2007 or 2009 version, but I did get a decant of El Día de los Reyes 2013. Although the notes in the description remained the same, Hot cocoa with cinnamon, coffee, and brown sugar, it seems to be different from previous years. Most reviews of those years speak of a hot chocolate scent. This year's version does indeed has a lush chocolate smell from the decant and wet on the skin, but when it dried the first time I tried it I got nothing but brown sugar. Until I realized I had put on very little, as chocolate scents often go to plastic on me. I reapplied and got another waft of delicious chocolate which soon disappeared to leave the stage for coffee and sugar with perhaps a bit of cinnamon. I had more or less contented myself with the thought that apparently my skin liked the cocoa so much it ate it all as soon as possible, when I reapplied a third time because I had lost much of the scent dishwashing. It can't be coincidence, three kings, three applications, the third time the cocoa note stayed on me, not very strong but after three hours it's still there. Thank you, Kings, for this wonderful gift. I must have been good in the past year!