Candleholder

Some people save string. Some save Christmas package wrappings. And some save odd buttons. Not me. I’m an old candle saver. And I am not referring to my age. I save old candles that have been burned down to thumb size in my assorted candlesticks. My penny-wise side simply will not let me throw them away. And, believe me, I’ve tried.

On the surface this may seem as unimportant as a ten-year-old’s running down the sidewalk and avoiding the cracks. But it is not. After a few years, it begins to loom up Matterhorn-size. I finally reached the point where I could hardly open a drawer without seeing little black tongues of candles sticking out at me. It can give you quite a complex.

Candles were everyplace. In cupboards. In drawers. In old Christmas gift boxes. There were red ones, green ones, yellow ones, pink ones, and just ones. (We are a candle family. My husband maintains I set the table with candles so he can’t see what he is eating. I am not a very good cook, either.)

Oh, sure, I found uses for them now and then, but the supply far exceeded the demand. I can use old candles when the electricity goes off during a storm. But this happens only about once a year for an hour or so in our neighborhood. And even if I light up the house like a night excursion boat, I can’t use up too many old candles in an hour.

I could melt them down and seal jams and jellies. But I don’t make jams and jellies.

Then one day, after reading a jolly little article on homemade Christmas gifts, I decided to do something. According to the article I could use up great quantities of old candles at one fell swoop. I collected all the candles from all the drawers, cupboards, and old Christmas gift boxes — even found a few in an old Ming vase (pronounced “vahs”). Reading directions, I got out a pan, several old quart milk cartons, and a piece of string (which, thank goodness, I am not a saver of), and went to work.

The article said right there that I could make “simply beautiful Christmas candles” by melting down old candles and pouring the wax into used milk cartons for molds. You tie a knot in the string, put the other end through a hole in the bottom of the milk carton, and hold the string in the center while you pour the melted wax into the carton. I got four cartons filled with melted old candles, or old melted candles. I had only four quart milk cartons, so then I resorted to cottage cheese cartons, which were all I could find for the melted wax I still had left over.

Using a cottage-cheese carton mold was not mentioned in the article. And when I finally extricated the hardened wax from the cartons, I wondered what in heaven’s name these fat, squatty candles could be used for. But, after keeping them around for two years, I finally discovered they worked beautifully in pumpkins at Halloween time. Because they are low and obese, they burn for a long time.

The big candles, after I once managed to separate them from the cartons (and this was not as easy as it said in the article), did not look at all Christmasy. They looked like small Washington Monuments painted by a three-year-old who had left them out in the rain. I have yet to master the art of blending old candle colors so they have “a beautiful rainbow effect.”

So now I have the big old candles made out of the little old candles, and except for those little squatty jobs I use once a year in pumpkins, I can’t find any use for them. They don’t fit my candlesticks — ever see a candlestick that would hold a milk carton? The only good thing about it is that I have all the old candles collected in big blobs, and I don’t have so many little black tongues sticking out at me.