myrrh

Frankincense and myrrh are both spicy-smelling resins extracted from shrubs and trees that grow on the Arabian Peninsula and in northeastern Africa and India.

Starting with mixtures of those substances, Egyptian perfume makers added a host of fragrant ingredients that included myrrh, resin and bark from styrax and pine trees, juniper berries, frankincense and nut grass.

Myrrh, meanwhile, is rougher, brown, perhaps more scatological, though fundamentally similar in size and sheen.

And, the story goes, her explorers, skilled in botanical espionage, secured the empire its first myrrh tree.

Frankincense and myrrh aren’t setting the commodities markets on fire, but gold is in high demand—as both Christmas gift and investment—for the second mid-pandemic holiday season in a row.

Same with the Three Kings and their gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Casper, Melchior, and Balthazar “presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”

The odor of myrrh is fragrant through itself, not through anything else.

Also, half a drachm of myrrh, taken every morning, is an excellent remedy against this malady.

But to this King myrrh is a peculiarly appropriate gift, for it is the symbol of complete self-abandonment.

That gold and incense should be offered a King is clearly His royal right; but what has he to do with the bitterness of myrrh?

It is the true spice-tree of our Northern clime, the myrrh and frankincense of the land of lingering snow.