The Collection That Never Comes Back: Trudon at Christmas
Every year at the end of October a small consignment arrives at Red Hill in heavy boxes, and every year I open the first one on the counter rather than out the back, because I want to see it before anybody tells me what I am looking at.
It is the Trudon Christmas collection. Four scents in three sizes, in glass that has been redrawn from scratch. And it exists for about ten weeks.
A house that has been at this since 1643
Trudon began in Paris in 1643, which makes it the oldest candlemaker in the world by a long distance. It supplied the churches of the city first, then the court at Versailles, then Napoleon's household, and it has never stopped in between. That is not a marketing line about heritage. It is an unbroken commercial record across four centuries, two revolutions and an empire.
Everything is still made in France, in Normandy. Vegetal wax rather than paraffin. Glass blown by mouth. Cotton wicks woven to suit each individual vessel rather than bought on a roll and cut to length, which is the unglamorous reason a Trudon burns cleanly to the edge and does not leave a ring of wax up the sides while the middle sinks.
Across the permanent range, that is the whole proposition. Consistency. The Abd El Kader you buy in March is the Abd El Kader you bought last March.
Christmas is the one time of year the house does the opposite.
The one collection that is designed to disappear
Once a year Trudon hands the glass to an artist.
Not a seasonal sticker on the existing vessel. A new object, a new palette, new gilding, and a story built underneath the whole thing. The scents may return, and the icons usually do. The glass never does. When the season closes the artwork is retired and it is not reissued the following year in a slightly different blue.
I have never seen another house in any category we carry do this with such discipline, and I think about it often, because the temptation to bring back a bestseller must be enormous.
2024. Eight yew trees in the Hall of Mirrors
Last year's collection was made with the artist Serdar Gulgun, and the world he built it around is the best thing I have read on the back of a box.
On the night of 25 February 1745 a masked ball was held in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, ostensibly to celebrate the marriage of the Dauphin to the Infanta of Spain. Thousands came. The Queen appeared at midnight in white, wearing the Regent and the Sancy diamonds in her hair.
Then eight men entered dressed as clipped yew trees. Identical, head to foot. One of them was Louis XV, and no woman in the room knew which.
The King had been widowed of his official mistress two months earlier and every woman at court understood exactly what the evening was for. Somewhere in the crowd, one of them worked out which yew tree was the King and made sure he noticed her. On 14 September that year she was presented at court as the Marquise de Pompadour. She held the position until she died in 1764.
That is the Bal des Ifs, and it is why the 2024 vessels are lined on the inside with twenty-four carat gold leaf, with chandeliers, pendants and drawn curtains worked around the outside. Gloria came in gold on ruby lacquer. The light through those glasses when they are lit does something the photographs cannot show you, which is presumably the entire point of putting the gold on the inside.
2025. Enchanted Night
This year's collection is called Enchanted Night, and it goes the other way. Deep celestial blue under gold rather than ruby and firelight.
Four symbols run through the range. A nutcracker out of Hoffmann's tale. A clock about to strike midnight. A treasure chest. And the bee, which has been Trudon's emblem for centuries and which turns up on the collection the way a signature turns up in a corner.
Two of the scents are returning icons and two are new.
Fir is the one people mean when they say Christmas candle. Emilie Bouge composed it, and it runs resinous conifer through myrrh and smoky incense absolute. It is a forest in cold air rather than anything sweet, and at no point does it smell like the inside of a car.
Nazareth is the historic one, by Emmanuel Philippe. Clove and orange zest over Bourbon vanilla. If you have ever walked into a house on the twenty-third of December and known immediately what month it was, this is that.
Luna is the departure. White flowers and cold night air, cool and luminous where a Christmas candle is almost always warm. It is the one that carries on well past January, which is worth knowing if you resent putting a candle away.
Libra is amber, and it is the most enveloping of the four.
Why the empty ones sell
Here is the part that tells you what these actually are.
Empty Trudon Christmas glasses are traded on the secondary market. Not the candles. The empty vessels, wax gone, sold on to people who want that year's artwork on a shelf.
Once you know that, the object reorganises itself in your head. You are not buying packaging around some wax. You are buying a piece of hand-blown French glass that carries one year's artwork and will never be made again, and it happens to arrive full of a scent composed in Grasse. The wax is the part that runs out. The glass is the part you keep.
It is why we stack them in the window in December and why they leave the shop in ones and twos rather than by the box.
The back vintage idea, and why we are doing it
We live inside a wine business. Sam has spent twenty years making wine that is better in its sixth year than its first, and the whole culture of a cellar door is built on the idea that you hold something back, that the library exists, and that a good customer eventually gets offered the bottle nobody else can find.
I have been thinking about the Trudon Christmas collection in exactly those terms.
So from this year we are keeping a small library. Two pieces from each season held back deliberately, put away, and offered the following years to the people who collect them. Not because they did not sell. Because a collection that never returns is precisely the kind of thing worth being able to offer somebody in three years when they finally want the one they walked past.
The library opens with the 2024 Bal des Ifs collection. Two Fir Great candles, three kilograms each, five wicks, in the gold leaf livery. The same Fir composition as this year and an entirely different object, and there is no longer anywhere in the world it can be bought new. Those two are on the site now rather than hidden, because I would rather you knew the library existed than found out about it by accident.
Each year that follows, two more go away.
Choosing between them
Three sizes, and they are genuinely different propositions rather than a pricing ladder.
The 270g Classic has one wick and burns fifty-five to sixty hours. It is enough to learn a scent and not enough to commit to it, which makes it both the best first Trudon and the best gift for somebody who has never been given one.
The 800g Intermezzo carries three wicks and a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty hours. This is the one for a long table, a room with people in it, a house at Christmas.
The 3kg Great carries five and runs past two hundred hours. It is bought for a staircase, a hallway or the end of a long room, and it will still be burning well after the tree has come down. It is furniture that happens to be lit.
One thing worth doing properly. The first time you light any candle, give it two to three hours so the wax pool reaches the edge of the glass. If you put it out early it will tunnel down the middle and never recover, and no amount of good wick weaving will save it. After that, trim to about five millimetres each time.
And when it is finished, freeze it. The last of the wax lifts out in one piece, the glass washes in warm soapy water, and you have the object you actually bought.
What we hold
Fir, Nazareth, Luna and Libra from Enchanted Night, across the three sizes, in the quantities you would expect from a shop our size. Plus the two 2024 Fir Great candles from the library.
Everything leaves Red Hill wrapped by hand, with a card written out if you would like one, and shipping is complimentary on orders over $100 anywhere in Australia.
If there is one you want, take it early. That is not a line to hurry you. It is that in ten weeks this collection stops existing, and the only ones left in the country will be the two we have put away.