My husband has decided he wants to get the kids gifts of gold, frankinscence and myrrh for Christmas-- or the modern equivalents. (He’s that oddest of ducks, a Christian Unitarian Universalist, while I’m a more usual (in UU terms) agnostic type. I pointed out that Christmas is really a pre-Christian festival, but heck, being a UU means you can celebrate however you want.) At least for the two older kids (14 and 9), we’ll probably get the 3 year old some more 3 year old type things. We going to have a fairly sparse Christmas, at least in terms of gifts, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He though that instead of a gift card of some sort, we’d give them $25 each of Sacajawea coins gift wrapped in a box (for non-US Dopers, these are golden colored dollar coins). For the frankincense, we’re kind of at a loss. For the myrrh, he says that myrrh was a resin that was chewed in Biblical times, so he suggests a pack of gum for myrrh. Is that right? And what is the modern eqivalent of frankincense? Maybe just… incense?
You might check out you local health food emporium: Tom’s of Maine makes toothpaste with actual myrrh in it, which might be a good idea if they’re going to to be chewing a lot of gum.
Well, if you want to go all out and actually do this right;
Find a “Books and Herbs” or Occult store and buy some actual Myrrh. It’s used as an incence. But it doesn’t burn by itself. So you’d need a metal incence burner and some charcoal deals (not BBQ charcoal!) that the store will have.
Smells pretty good. They’re sure to have Frankincense.
Myrrh sells at my local shop for $1.40 per ounce. That’s probably more than enough. So your big expense is really the burner ($10-15) and the charcoal deals ($3 for 10?)
$25 bucks and you can smell these ancient scents in your house a couple of times.
Or for $5, you just buy the stuff and use it in potpouri.
Myrrh was used to make perfume, too.
Frankincense was plain ole’ incense.