A couple of years ago, my husband bought me a nice incense burner at the Renaissance Festival that comes to town every year. At the same time, we bought several sticks of incense. We figured we would only use it once in a while, to freshen up the smell of the house (kids can sure make things stink sometimes, as could the dogs we had at the time!). We didn't think we would use it at least once a week.

Since we were using it more than we had planned, we ended up going through our higher-priced incense sticks rather quickly. I decided to pick some more incense up at the grocery store. It smelled wonderful at the store, but we soon found out that the cheap stuff not only burned quicker, it also didn't smell anywhere near as pleasant while it was burning. Incense from other local stores brought the same results.

We decided to put away our incense burner away until we could find a place to buy more quality incense from either an online source or the return of the Renaissance Festival. In the meantime, we turned to using scented oils!