Orange thyme is my favorite thyme variety we grow. It smells fantastic, like spicey orange blossoms, and, being a smallish, compact plant, is super cute in the garden. It’s also the trickiest and slowest-growing thyme we raise, and I’m a sucker for a good challenge: I like the herbs that make me earn their love. Perhaps Samara sensed my favoritism, or perhaps this soap is particularly photogenic–whatever the impetus, we now have an abundance of gorgeous Orange Thyme soap pictures for our web site update (and please feel free to weigh in on which one you think is best)!
We’ve been growing orange thyme ever since stumbling across the variety in an heirloom seed catalog. We sold the plants at spring and summer markets but didn’t use the herb in our products until a few years ago when we got the brilliant idea to tap into the annual holiday shopping surge by revamping some of our bath and body products with Christmas themes. Hence our Peppermint soap and lip balm became Candy Cane soap and balm and our Sage Rosemary soap and lip balm became O Christmas Tree soap and balm. I was also dying to work in the name Christmas Thyme, because let’s face it, the word thyme is a pun just waiting to happen, but none of our current soap or lip balm scents seemed to fit that moniker. That’s when our Orange Thyme soap was born.
I remembered hearing a story in grade school about children of prairie settlers who treasured the oranges they received for Christmas because that was the only time a year they got to eat an orange. Thyme also has kind of a woodsy, pine-like scent, and thus orange thyme jumped out as the natural herb to bear the Christmas Thyme name. Each November we now make a batch of Christmas Thyme soap that we sell throughout the holiday season. If we have any bars left at the end of the year, they get relabeled as Orange Thyme and are usually snapped up by the end of January.
But as I mentioned, I’m a particular fan of the Orange Thyme soap. Each year I sneak one bar from our holiday stock to keep in my own shower. I enjoy the scent and, being the skin-conscious 30-something I am, I also enjoy thyme’s skin-toning and skin-clarifying properties. Thyme is also antibacterial, which is always a useful thing in a soap, and it calms the nerves while strengthening memory and concentration. I get some of my best ideas in the shower. Is it the soap? It just may be! Hence my secret master plan to one day bring Orange Thyme soap into our list of permanent inventory items. After all, it’s beyond thyme!
We would love to hear from you! What do you think? Which photo best captures the spirit of
Pickle Creek’s Orange Thyme soap?!
