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One of the main products that was sold in shops besides candles was soap, which was used for bathing and cleaning. Most of the time only the more wealthy bought soap from chandler's, the less wealthy would just make their own.
Most colonial homes included only two candlesticks. Nightfall forced the colonial person into a range of activities far different from what we experience now. For instance, most work stopped with the failure of natural light. Reading was difficult by candlelight, so the colonial American could only sit in the dimness to engage in conversation or else go to sleep.
Colonial people, like the generations before them, made candles by first rendering animal fats into a substance called tallow. Tallow can be melted and dipped to make fat taper candles, but the resulting tapers are much softer than the wax candles found today. They also tended to smell bad, and drip excessively. Because of the softness, tallow candles tended to burn with a low light, and they didn't last very long. Tallow was available and the candles could be made in large batches at home. During the fall, when the weather was cool enough to store these soft candles, women gathered to make enough tallow candles to last their households through the long winter months.
For those with some extra money to spend on candles, rolled beeswax candles were available. Beeswax smells great and lasts a lot longer than tallow, but it was expensive.
There was also a new kind of wax made from bayberries. Bayberry wax was hard, didn't drip or run like tallow, and smelled good. Since bayberries were widely available, this would seem to be a handy alternative. The problem was that the process was time consuming, and it took many pounds of berries to make just one candle. With time at a premium, bayberry candles simply weren't practical.