Pure bayberry candles, traditionally lucky at Christmas
100% pure bayberry-wax hand-dipped tapered candles.
[NOTE: for international orders I will need to receive postage before posting - see note at bottom. I'm not quite sure what's going to be happening about postage to the US, so check first: I know that owing to the new tariffs Royal Mail is no longer posting items valued over £100 to the US but I'm not sure.]
Approximately 7½" to 8" tall by ¾" wide at base, these traditionally-made, hand-dipped, spicy-smelling candles are believed to bring good fortune, especially at weddings, housewarming, Christmas and New Year, and are also used in some pagan/Wiccan spell-work. They burn for 1½ - 2 hours to leave fantastic, gothic-looking dribbles and spikes of grey-green wax.
Bayberry candles were originally made by American settlers from the wax of Myrica cerifera, the candleberry or bayberry tree, which grows in sandy areas along the North American Atlantic coast from Maryland northwards, and around Lake Erie. They have a strong spicy scent, and are popular good-luck charms in the U.S.A., particularly in New England.
They are given as favours, especially at weddings and housewarmings. Lit at sunset at Christmas or on New Year's Eve, and allowed to burn all the way down, they are said to re-unite separated sweethearts and bring luck for the coming year. A traditional rhyme about them states:
a bayberry candle
burned to the socket
brings joy to the heart
and gold to the pocket
Bayberry wax is also sometimes a required ingredient for pagan/Wiccan spells, especially spells of American origin.
Beware of imitations: most commercially available "bayberry candles" are either made with bayberry wax mixed with paraffin or beeswax; or paraffin wax candles with a little bayberry essential oil added; or even paraffin wax with artificial bayberry scent added. These, however, are the real, 100% pure deal - which is why they're the colour of phlegm, but they smell wonderful; something like pine needles and Christmas cake rolled into one.
So far as I know I am the only person in Europe - possibly the only person anywhere in the world outside the U.S.A. and Canada - making pure bayberry wax candles for sale. Even in the U.S. they are quite hard to come by - and usually a lot dearer than these, even allowing for the transport costs.
Note: bayberry wax is scarily expensive. Including postage from the US, and tax, the raw wax costs me about £25 a pound to import. It also burns quite inefficiently, so once your candle has burned down you will still be left with at least half the wax you started with. I recommend against just throwing out this precious resource. The main non-magical use for bayberry wax is as rust-proof, non-toxic protection for metal surfaces. When you put your gardening tools away for the winter, if you wipe your blades clean and then coat them with a fine layer of melted bayberry wax, it will keep them pristine over the winter, and because bayberry wax is brittle you can just flake it off easily in the spring.
[Exact shape of candles may vary slightly due to being hand-made, and a peculiarity of the cooling properties of the wax means that they often end up slightly corrugated rather than smooth.]
U.K. postage is £4.80 (£5.55 for First Class) for orders weighing up to 2kg including packaging, which is generally about twelve pairs, but as the order gets bigger I'll have to use larger and more expensive packaging tubes, so check with me for orders over four pairs. Postage prices for larger and/or international orders are available on request.
If you order from abroad eBay will charge you £8.75, which is the rate for one or two pairs going to continental Europe. Larger packages or ones going farther afield will be somewhat more: please contact me for the exact price.
Notify me if you are outside Europe and want to go with Economy Class, which is £8 for one or two pairs going anywhere in the world. But note that Economy Class is SLOW. Customers ordering for Christmas from countries outside Europe are advised to get their orders in by the end of October at latest, so that their package can go by Economy post. As we get closer to Christmas please bear in mind that you may want the more expensive Standard International airmail post. Customers who do order by Economy post will need to send me a PM message confirming that they realise their shipment may take six to eight weeks, as I've had customers ordering by Economy post and then claiming for a refund because their package hadn't arrived after four weeks.
I have to say, with regret, that I can only replace missing international orders if the buyer pays for them to be tracked, and only replace broken ones from international orders if the buyer sends back the wax from the broken candles(s). The alternatives would be either to stop selling internationally at all, or to raise the price to about £14 a pair. At the moment I keep my prices down so people can afford them but that means my profit is only £2 per pair, and international post is so expensive that if I can't claim the costs of a missing package back from the post office, a single lost international package can easily wipe out a third of my profit for the entire year.