All the candle you can handle

Let's talk candles.

You have probably noticed that I burn candles year round, but there is a significant uptick in such activity in my house come the first of September and lasting throughout the holiday season.

September first is when -- even though as a rule it's still plenty hot here at that time -- I begin to feel the old craving for all forms of autumn coziness.

Candles, along with cooking, fire up all of my brain's domesticity receptors. And I think that I may have more of those than some people.

I'm not talking about only scented candles; tealights -- even the battery-operated kind -- come heavily into play too, and occasionally even tapers and pillars see some action.

Have you delved into the world of sceneted wax, to melt in both electric and candle-powered warmers?

The pirate is pretty deeply into those types of things.

Allow me to elaborate.

As late summer waned, I began searching my stores of partially-used jar candles, to see what I had and what I needed.

My tastes are simple and economical: Most of the time I go for the Walmart Mainstays jar candles.

They are cheap (although not as cheap as they were in the good old days pre-2020) and they produce a very nice throw of scent into the room. You can rely on these candles to scent the area with zero ambiguity.

So make sure you really love the scent before you light one of these.

Look. If you love a Yankee Candle, God bless you. I'm sure that if I were made out of money, I could pick out several of their flavors and enjoy them, all seasons, just go wild.

But since those candles cost at least five times more than the Mainstays candles, I don't even look at those.

I realize that they have sales, and in fact Yankee Candle has a nice sale going on right now, through October fifth.

It's just that I have never found that, even with sale prices, the prestige label either justifies the price, or makes their candles better than the economy kind.

I'm aware that Yankee Candle may have a fragrance that you are attached to for a particular season. Their balsam and cedar scent is popular at Christmas, for example. And you can probably get one candle to last the whole month of December if you burn it judiciously.

It's up to you.

But for the pirate, by and large it's the Mainstays full-size (20-ounce) single-wick scented jar candle for either four ninety-six (that's the good-old-days price) or six thirty-three (prices for this item seem to be fluid at this point) or, in a pinch, the smaller, fatter 11.5-ounce three-wick version for (currently) three dollars and thirty-three cents.

My go-to scents are pumpkin spice, apple pumpkin, and mulled cider. If I could only find or have one of those for autumn, I would probably choose the pumpkin spice, but the mulled cider is so heavenly that I would be conflicted.

(Mulled Cider smells -- to me -- exactly like Claire Burke Apple Jack and Peel. And as far as I am concerned, that is the consummate fall fragrance.)

Years ago I purchased filigreed metal holders for the two aforementioned Mainstays jar candle sizes, so I buy both and they look pretty wherever you put them.

Now.

I'm always reminding myself to branch out, and I really do work at that.

As a result, I have noticed in recent days that you should check the jar candle aisle in any store that carries them.

That includes the obvious places such as Hobby Lobby and Michael's, but also the grocery store.

For example, the girls and i were shopping at a Kroger Supercenter a few months ago and noticed that they had full-size Candle-Lite jar candles on sale.

(Candle-Lite is the manufacturer of the Mainstays jar candles, which explains a lot about the quality of their fragrance.)