Longtime resident Marcia Burr has turned a lifelong interest into a small cottage industry with a Hingham flair. Her Hingham Village “pure and natural” hand-poured soybean wax candles come in many scents. Holiday fragrances include “Hingham White Lights,” “Christmas in the Square,” “Main Street Wreath,” and “Greenbush Sugar Cookie.”

“I’ve been fascinated by candles all my life,” Burr said with a warm smile. “Candles lend a special feeling to the holiday season, adding another dimension of shimmering, twinkling light. They enhance the ambience of social gatherings any time of the year.”

Burr fondly recalls as a child seeing her mother light candles every time she entertained, including family celebrations and dinners.

“She had a drawer in the dining room filled with boxes of candles that she had used once, because she always used fresh candles,” Burr said. “I used to enjoy going through that drawer! I loved the different colors, shapes, and aromas.

“They just add something extra,” she said. “In your dream moment, you can see yourself relaxing in a bubble bath with candles all around to enhance the moment.” Burr’s candles, crafted at the “Village Candle Kitchen” in her Hingham home, are made “with a little bit of love” and a sprinkle of sparkly glitter on top of each one for a festive touch. The candles are carefully hand poured in small batches using top-quality ingredients. They are also triple-scented “in luscious fragrance” from top to bottom and tinted in a full palette of decorator colors.

“This is what I can do to let my light shine,” Burr said. “I’ve loved candles all my life, and this is my way of giving back. I love the idea that I am bringing a little warmth and light and relaxation to what can sometimes be a very dark world.”

Other fragrances include “Bare Cove Brownies,” “Bathing Beach Glow,” “Buttonwood Apple Pie,” Harbormen Mint,” Home Meadows Harvest,” “Old Ship Chanel #5,” “Queen Anne’s Lovespell,” “Shells & Seaglass,” “World’s End Cranberry,” and many more.

Burr, who was a familiar face in the Hingham Town Hall tax collector’s office for 13 years, has sold her candles at local craft shows, holiday fairs, and home parties and is now looking for a local outlet in Hingham that would like to sell them. For five years before closing, Treasures in downtown Hingham carried Burr’s candles at Christmastime. “As impulse items displayed at the check-out counter, they flew off the shelves,” Burr recalled. The West Hingham Tedeschi’s also sold them for a time.

 “Candles have a variety of uses – to refresh, deodorize and scent the environment – true aromatherapy! – to enhance a romantic moment, to transform an ordinary day, to uplift and share during celebrations and the holidays, and to calm and soothe while practicing yoga or during times of prayer and meditation, Burr said.

Her candles are made from 100 percent natural American farm-grown soybeans. “The wax burns 30 to 50 percent longer,” Burr said. “They also burn cooler, scent the air more rapidly, and smell stronger than paraffin wax candles.”

She also noted that “soy candles contain no lead, harmful vapors, or carcinogens. Also, properly trimmed, the wicks produce no petrocarbon soot to blacken walls and furnishings,” Burr said.

She handcrafts all the candles herself. They range from ones in large apothecary and hexagon jars to free-standing chunky pillars and votives to a special “Jumbo Cupcake Candle” (available in “Birthday Cake,” chocolate mint, raspberry, peanut butter, banana, lime, and other scents) and “Tart Melts.”

Some of the cylinder candles are embedded with different colored candle cubes over-poured with another color so that chunks of color show through the sides. She embeds some of her candles with seaglass, overpoured with turquoise wax.

As a young girl, Burr would buy paraffin blocks at the supermarket and make sand candles and snowball candles in milk cartons covered with whipped wax. “I seemed to be crafty even back then,” she said. “I was always poking at the wicks and playing with the wax shavings.”

While still at Town Hall, Burr started making candles again at Christmastime five years ago after seeing a young mother pouring soy candles in her kitchen during a walkabout Christmas fair in New Hampshire. “I hadn’t heard of soy candles before and was fascinated by the process,” Burr said. “I thought, ‘If this mother with three small children can find the time to make candles in her kitchen, so can I.’”

After picking up some tips from the young mother, Burr did some research online. “There were 4,000 hits for soy candles! I learned how to make and sell them and how to print my own labels and brochures,” Burr said. “I taught myself everything!”

Her candles – the first ones were poured into teacups, an idea she got from a friend -- were well-received when she gave them as gifts to co-workers and sold them to some neighbors and friends. This gave her a boost of confidence, and she subsequently booked herself into several craft shows before Christmas and held a home candle party.

Last June, after taking a break from candlemaking, Burr received invitations to sell her candles at two local craft shows. “That’s when I decided to give it another shot,” she said. Within a few weeks of Thanksgiving, Burr sold her candles at six craft shows, including one at Hingham’s First Baptist Church.

She buys the soy wax in 50-pound cases – “the best quality I can find,” she said. “It looks like a mass of lentils – creamy little pastiles of soy wax which I then pour into my Presto pot to melt them. They have a beautiful, creamy consistency.”

Burr pours the melted soy wax from a pour pot that has a spigot designed by her husband and his cousin, Tuck Wadleigh, a well-known longtime Hingham resident. The candles have a good hot and cold throw, which means they have a nice scent even when they aren’t burning.

Burr, who grew up in Hingham and graduated from Hingham High School in 1962, says she is a “townie.” She recalls first meeting her second husband, Dave Burr, when she was in high school. Although they were good friends and he drove her to school every day in his 1931 Model A Ford pickup truck and took her to the senior prom, it wasn’t until many years later when they were both divorced that she learned that he had carried a flame for her all through high school but had been too shy to say so.

Eighteen years after they graduated, Marcia and Dave ran into each other at a class reunion committee meeting. (Dave later admitted that he had gone to the meeting hoping to run into her after finding out that she, too, was single again.) The spark was still there. The couple started dating – a year later, with Dave waiting patiently for Marcia to regroup after her divorce – and have been happily married for 27 years – an ongoing reason to bring out the celebratory candles.

“I think we were meant to be together, but we just weren’t ready back in high school. We had things to experience,” Burr said. “It was like coming home to get together with him so many years later.”

In addition to her candlemaking skills, Burr can sing. Music is no stranger to her family – her brother, Steve Waynen of Hingham, is a musician who plays local gigs. Burr used to sing with the Sweet Adelines North River Chapter, a women’s barbershop harmony chorus.

Burr also sang with the Jingle Belles some years back along with fellow Town Hall staff Eileen McCracken (now the town clerk), former treasurer/collector Ruth Anne Beck, and Carol McCormack of the same office. “We used to sing at Town Hall Christmas parties and other office parties,” Burr said.