Product Review: Yankee Candle Scented Christmas Tree Ornaments

Yankee Candle always has great seasonal merchandise, and when it comes to Christmas, Yankee seems to offer every product under the sun. Readers of my previous Associated Content articles will know that I am a Yankee Candle fanatic. This holiday season, Yankee Candle will offer scented Christmas tree ornaments in three different fragrances. The ornaments come in an attractive package ready for gift-giving, are pretty cute, and retail for just $4.99, but are they really worth the money?

The ornaments are made out of porcelain and come in three different shapes (a Christmas tree, a Christmas cookie, and a snowflake) which vary based on the fragrance you choose. The three scents available in the ornaments are Balsam & Cedar, Christmas Cookie, and Home for the Holidays. The ornaments are wrapped in plastic when you buy them and will release fragrance as soon as you take them out of the package. In fact, when I first unwrapped an ornament, I was surprised at the strength and quality of the fragrance. The Christmas Cookie ornament really smelled just like fresh baked sugar cookies!

When the fragrance fades, you can "refresh" the smell by dabbing oil on the ornament. The idea is that, since the ornament is porous, it will soak up the fragrance oil. A small vial of oil is included in each package for this purpose. In reality, the oil is difficult to apply to the ornament since it is not quickly absorbed by the surface. The "applicator" on the bottle is hard to use, and seems poorly designed. Also, the snowflake ornament is a cutout design with lots of little holes--this made refreshing the ornament even more difficult and messy.

The Yankee Candle scented Christmas ornaments do smell good, but they don't give off a whole lot of fragrance. Also, the strong fragrance doesn't seem to last very long, so you'll be applying oil to the ornament pretty frequently. They may work well in a drawer or a car, but don't hang one of these on your artificial tree and expect your whole house to smell like pine. In fact, you would literally need at least a dozen of these ornaments to get any noticeable amount of scent in a larger area like a living room, which would be prohibitively expensive for most people. In the end, these ornaments by Yankee Candle are a cute idea, but a few votive candles would be a much more practical gift and would provide more fragrance.