1. Smell:

My first Christmas tree lot of the season.  That pine smell is one of those smells that opens up a kind of atemporal memory space of other smellings.  Or at least, it reminds me of going to church as a kid to watch the Christmas Bear pageant, in which the sanctuary was filled with trees and there was a sound effect of crunching snow.

2. Word:

John Lydgate in the 15th century writes: “myn auctour axith” (“my author asks).  Proving that metathesis is not a modern form of linguistic degeneracy but a normal feature of language that has given us the ability to say the very important sentence “the bright bird wrought a third nostril.”