Cloves

Day 9 of Spicemas

Now, the packet in the calendar contains ground cloves, but the project today - which is a very fun one if you have small children in the house! - will take whole cloves. The best way to acquire them is cheaply in bulk for this. Particularly if you have a hoard… well, yes, I do mean horde, but also, children are worth their weight in gold, so I suppose you can call your family your hoard. Where was I?

Ah yes! Pomanders!

For this project you will need a quantity of whole cloves, apples or oranges, a few toothpicks (or just one if you are doing it alone) and perhaps a little thin ribbon.

If you only push a few cloves into the fruit, it will not last for long, and should be kept in the refrigerator when not on display. If you push in loads of cloves, and give it time, eventually it will dry and you’ll have a fragrant fruit mummy to lend sweetness to the air.

Pomanders were once perfumed fruit, or for the wealthy, perfumes held in intricate orbs, skulls, and all manner of shapes. They were intended to hold the miasmas of the world at bay, and thought to help prevent disease by giving the holder something good to smell when the foulness was overwhelming. In a world before modern sanitation, everything stank. So while the pomander would not hold germs back, they could make life more tolerable.

Cloves have an antiseptic property, which combined with the fragrance, made them a treatment of choice for toothaches (that, and clove oil numbs… but oh is it nasty!) and a whole clove was sometimes chewed to sweeten the breath.

I found poking a hole with the toothpick made pushing the clove in easier, and also making a design was more precise.

Which is why I had to laugh when I told my husband what I planned to do today, and he perked up. He informed me that when he was a young man, stationed in Germany, he’d been involved with the SCA (Society of Creative Anachronism). At the time, which would be over forty years ago now, the tradition was that if you carried a pomander, you could give a clove from it to another, but only by passing it from lip to lip. He got a reminiscent glint. One of the young ladies, he informed me, was very good at hiding the clove! Over time, the king or duke of the SCA Realm declared that they could only use a grape for the fruit of a pomander. Grapes, my husband shook his head sorrowfully, only hold one or two cloves before they split. Some time after that, a newly crowned princess declared watermelon to be a grape!

Shenanigans aside, if you have enough cloves in your fruit, it will not rot, but will slowly (or here in Texas, I suspect not so slowly) dry out. If you were to tie it up with a ribbon you could hang it on the Christmas tree. Or, once you are confident it is dried and not going to rot, it would be hung in a closet to add it’s perfume to the contents therein.

I will say that once you are done with this craft, your hands will smell delicious!