Half of us believe they should do one job – support a flame and not get in the way – and therefore be as clear as possible. Half of us think that sounds like a miserable philosophy and want them to bring some joy to the kitchen table at half seven when everyone is half asleep in their coats, so we want colour, patterns, texture, something interesting happening to the glass that reflects the light just right. We’ve been buying them for three years and neither side has convinced the other yet. Honestly, don’t open the cupboard. It’s a disastrous mess of half-clear candle holders with varying levels of actual clarity inside each other.
One thing we can agree on is that the really cheap flimsy ones are bad buys masquerading as gifts. They looked innocent when you got them but one day you put one in the dishwasher on a normal cycle and it emerges forty minutes later retired, cloudy and sad.
Literally baked on age.
That is not a chocolate roulade, that is just wear and tear.
The good ones feel solid in your hands as soon as you pick them up, and are proof against being grabbed by someone who can’t quite remember where they are at half seven in the morning while groping around for matches. Not how they look in au natural lighting, how they look when they’re actually being used is what matters.
Then there’s always tealight vs taper. Nobody mentions this camp before you’re in on it because they don’t realise it’s a thing, then you own one of each and they are two completely different animals wearing the same skin. We use our tealight ones all the time – shoved on the bath, on the windowsill, anywhere because they’re small and cheap enough that it doesn’t matter. The tall ones seem important so we save them for special occasions twice a year then feel vaguely guilty storing them in a drawer for the other 363.
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I think one of us has three we literally never light, they just sit there reminding us we could be using them to look pretty but we’re too lazy.
The worst bit about candles isn’t even the wax bribes you have to leave on the dinner table, it’s the wax you’re supposed to remove from the candle holder afterwards.
Nobody advertises that bit.
There’s no “battle-hardened, yet refined wax removal skills” in the catalogue. There’s just you at eleven at night stabbing at the wax with a butter knife hoping the leverage will shift it out of the groove it’s clearly settled into for life. Trick is to put them in the freezer, works about half the time. Fail and you either live with it or buy a new one. Buy a new one and, spoiler alert: they’re always the ones that ended up being birthday presents so we were excused spending eight quid on something so trivial anyway.
The ones we end up keeping forever aren’t the nice ones, they’re normally the ones that came out of a box labelled “kitchen misc” with zero cushioning at the end of a move and survived, or the one your cat knocked off the shelf two times but it just bounced. That’s the specification to look for in a candle holder, not the shape or the colour or how many swirls. Whether it loves you back.
Trust me, we argue about the look. About everything but that.
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