Why the Smell of a Real Christmas Tree Takes You Straight Back to Childhood

You walk past a Christmas tree lot, or into a friend's house in December, and it hits you. That smell of fresh pine. Before you've even thought about it, you're seven years old again, lying on the carpet, staring up at the lights.

There's a real reason that happens, and it's one of the biggest reasons I started this business.

Smell takes a shortcut in your brain

Most of what you see and hear gets processed and sorted before it reaches the parts of your brain that handle emotion and memory. Smell doesn't work that way. Signals from your nose travel to the olfactory bulb, which connects directly to the amygdala (emotion) and the hippocampus (memory).

That's why a smell can bring back a memory instantly, and why it often comes with a feeling attached. Scientists even have a name for it: the "Proust effect", after a French writer who described a whole flood of childhood memories coming back from the smell of a biscuit dipped in tea.

Smell memories feel more emotional

Researchers such as Dr Rachel Herz at Brown University have found that memories triggered by smell tend to feel more emotional and more vivid than memories triggered by sight or sound. You don't just remember Christmas. You feel it.

So what is that pine smell, exactly?

A lot of that fresh, clean scent comes from natural compounds called pinenes, which pine trees release from their needles and sap. They're the same compounds that make a walk through a pine forest smell the way it does. A fresh-cut tree in a warm Sydney living room keeps releasing them all season long.

A plastic tree, no matter how good it looks, gives off none of it.

You're making memories right now

Here's the part that gets me. Your kids are building their own version of this as we speak. The smell of the tree, the lights, the family around it on Christmas morning: that's what they'll be chasing when they're grown up with kids of their own.

It doesn't only work for kids, either. Newlyweds doing their first Christmas together, grandparents hosting the whole family again, a busy office that needs a bit of a lift in December. A real tree changes how a room feels.

Bring the smell home

We'll hand-pick a fresh-cut pine, deliver it to your door, set it up in your stand and tidy up after ourselves. All you have to do is breathe in.

Choose your tree and delivery day here.