When I was a kid, I loved the idea of fire, but my parents would never let me have anything to do with it. This is probably like most children. You want to play with what is forbidden to you. The exception was when there was a birthday, and then sometimes I would get to light some candles on someone's birthday cake. And of course, when it was my own birthday, I would get to blow them out. This was my first introduction to being able to handle a form of fire.
Candle wax is wonderful, until you realize that when it melts, it is almost as hot as the fire itself. When I was a child, at Christmas Eve Service they would give us little candles which would be lit at the end of the service, as we passed the light of Christ throughout the congregation. The candles had little paper holders around the bottom, which in theory would catch the wax, but they never would quite do the trick. We would be holding the Light of Christ, but the byproduct of the light of the baby Jesus would be dripping down onto our hands and burning us. It was an exercise in irony.
It was hot as Hell.
I hadn't thought about what candle wax would do to other objects, either, but once, blowing out the candles on my mother's dinner table, I realized (all too late) that I should have used the little bell-shaped candle snuffer, because the liquid, red wax from the candles blew onto her elegant cream-colored best table cloth, and the stains never came out. We never had much money, and we couldn't afford to replace the tablecloth. The look in my mother's eyes when she looked at that stain hurt me worse than hot wax could ever have done.
You can't have light without heat. And you can't have candle light without candle wax.
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