The Night Before: Christmas Eve Box for Grown-ups

1. On Christmas Eve, once the shops have shut, set the candle on a heatproof plate and light it. Give the wooden wick a minute to catch; it crackles as it settles.
2. Brew a heaped teaspoon of the tea in water just off the boil for 4 minutes, put the socks on and start the film you watch every year.
3. Before bed, mist the pillow once from arm's length and put the candle out: never leave it burning in an empty room, and trim the wick to 5 mm before the next evening. The soap waits for the morning.

• A soy wax candle scented with brandy butter, 300 g, in a black concrete pot about 7.5 cm across, with a wooden wick and felt pads underneath. The empty pot can keep a small plant.
• 50 g of loose black tea with orange peel, cinnamon, ginger, clove, cardamom and black pepper, in a copper-coloured tin; the maker calls the blend 'Black Magic'.
• One pair of socks, 70% bamboo, size S/M (UK 3.5 to 6.5, EU 36 to 40): navy, with pale moons, stars and blush-pink toes.
• A 100 ml room and pillow spray, 'Cosy Winter Nights', made in the UK: cinnamon and clove over jasmine, violet and rose, with musk and vanilla underneath.
• A 120 g tub of whipped soap, 'Warm Gingerbread': orange, cinnamon and ginger with a butter-biscuit and vanilla finish, and a fine shimmer.

The pieces arrive together in one parcel. They are not gift-wrapped and there is no box, so the box can be one of your own.

The poem that opens on the night before Christmas, 'A Visit from St. Nicholas', was first printed without an author's name in the Troy Sentinel, a New York newspaper, on 23 December 1823. Clement Clarke Moore included it in his own book of poems in 1844.