You are unlikely to get through the Christmas festivities this year without seeing a candle which has been made in one of the midland's most progressive companies, Duffy and Scott of Tullamore.
The company, which was started in a Dublin flat early in the last decade, has now captured a large section of the market in Ireland.
You will find the product from Tullamore in churches, restaurants and in the homes of people who like decorative scented candles.
Now Duffy and Scott, based at Kilcruttin Business Park, is also exporting to the UK and Germany.
The company had its beginnings in a flat in the Irish Life Centre in Dublin, where Martina Duffy and her German-born husband, Willie Motz, moved into the candle business.
"We had to wait a year and a half there for a telephone connection and I had to contact customers from the payphone in the GPO. That was not satisfactory," said Martina, who was born in Naul, Co Dublin.
Initially she and her husband supplied churches only with their simple range of candles, which they made in a factory located on the first floor of a building to which all the materials had to be hauled by a pulley.
"When we moved to Tullamore and found a premises here, things improved dramatically and we went from making 4,700 candles per hour to making up to 16,000," she added.
The couple began to decorate candles and introduced scented stock to the trade, finding an outlet in restaurants and homes.
"When electricity was put into every home in the country, people seemed quite happy to throw the candles out.
"But in recent years they have been turning back to the candles again to decorate their homes," she said.
In addition candles are being used in aromatherapy, on film sets and in a whole range of areas right throughout a society which is becoming more sophisticated.
The basic art of making candles has changed little over the years, with beeswax and wax paraffin substitute being the basic materials.
"Of course there are not enough bees in Ireland to provide us with the wax we need. We have to import from the Continent and from the US. Beeswax comes in different colours because it depends on what the bees are feeding on, so there is a great variation in colour," she explained.
Currently the factory employs 26 people. The company also has out-workers who do decorative and other work on the company's products.
Earlier this week, just before Martina and her husband left the country on their Christmas break, work was already well advanced on planning for next Christmas.
"We are very busy in the middle of the year, and by the middle of December we would have sent out our stocks to the churches and other outlets, so we can relax a little," she said.
But after their break the couple will be facing one of the busiest years ever because Martina believes the millennium will create additional demand.
"For instance, the churches will be starting the millennium celebrations before anyone else. We are already making special millennium candles for churches which will be lit on Christmas Eve of 1999," she said.
Some of these giant candles, well over six feet tall, will be burning in churches for the full year as part of the celebrations.
However, this year has been a very good one for the company. The Christmas storms last year sent demand for candles soaring.
They will also remember 1998 as the year the company received the Arts Sponsor of the Year Award for its involvement with the Handel Festival in Dublin, where candles were presented to all the musicians taking part.