I was a candle

Can I? (Yes. Yes I can. Snow bones about it.)

Lacre; where do you get it?
The lacrefalls have not yet started Nope, there it is, right after I posted this. A storylet called Snowbound! shows up. You can’t go to your lodgings when snowed in, but that’s not really a huge deal, as it’s fairly easy to get rid of. All the options will provide you with a single pail, except for getting a Master to do it. However, you’ll get an Incardanine Robe 3 weeks instantly after you get a Master to assist, plus a reasonably expensive other item, so it works out pretty good. Time the Healer will refresh Snowbound every time it shows; it’s the only time of year where you actually want TtH to come barging in!

You can also get pails from Urchins; they sell the stuff on their opportunity card. You’ll need 20 Connected, plus some items; their initial price last year was 5 Storm-Threnodies, increasing to 7 + 1 Night Whisper after the Wicket opened. Buy your lacre early, don’t leave it to the last minute! (edit; apparently they’re asking for the high price straight away! damn it all!)

Some other sources exist; a few of the Sacks options can give a pail, and the relevant Advent code does too. Perhaps other things, later, maybe.

What does it do?
You can get items, a pet, Scholar of the Correspondence increases or a Destiny, but chief of all is Putting the Pieces Together; the Taste of Lacre, which is needed to get Lodgings and other prizes from the Wicket at the end of the season. Maybe it’ll come in useful in other ways this year! Certainly, you could spend it on Tears of the Bazaar in the Nadir, but that’s damned expensive, especially considering how much extra pails cost! 

I’m not going to go through every option individually; check the wiki if you’d like the absolute details on that. The most interesting options are probably the ones to feed it to creatures other than yourself, and the option to stare down the bucket with a Semiotic Monocle. Look real hard at that bucket. Aw yeah.

Balefully glaring at a bucket is a Scholar of the Correspondence challenge, so if you don’t have it particularly high then you may encounter some difficulty. You do get a bit of Scholar experience for looking at a bucket, as far as 15, which is worth keeping in mind (although if that’s all you want, you may want to consider the Correspondent option instead. That option is kinda monstrous difficult, though, even at SotC 21 you only have an 84% chance of success. Nasty.)

What’s the best way to raise Taste of Lacre?
Assuming you start from zero; Look at a bucket with a Semiotic Monocle to get 3, get two more points of Taste of Lacre to reach 5, then look at the bucket again to reach 8. Dunking souls works pretty well for getting to 5; gotta do it twice, though. If you look at the bucket with 4 Taste, then you’ll end up at 7, unable to go any higher, and if you look at it at 6 then you won’t get any Taste at all!

I don’t recommend feeding buckets to pigs at the moment; wait for the Sackses to show up. Many of them will add extra points of Taste of Lacre, and last year you only needed 9 Taste for the most expensive thing, so accumulating many levels was pretty worthless. This year may not be the same, but it pays to be cautious. Investigating with one of the Fate-locked factions will probably get you a huge chunk of Taste as well, so you wanna have your Taste as high as you can possibly get it to take best advantage of this.

Huffing Tears is super risky, given the 20% chance to lose an expensive item. If you lose the Tears, you get +2 Taste instead of +1; that’s not much of a lagniappe, but it may help. Or hinder, if you’re trying to huff Tears to reach 5 Taste. Tip; don’t do that. Still, if it comes down to the wire and you’re missing a point or two… you may want to consider it.

Last year, the Bazaar showed up in IRC and bestowed upon us the gift of an access code that gave +1 Taste of Lacre. That code doesn’t work any more, but something similar may happen again. Or not. Probably not. Still, worth keeping in mind.

What’s Taste of Lacre actually good for?

As mentioned above; you can use it in the Wicket to get nice things. The main thing are 5 card Lodgings; for a fairly high Taste of Lacre price and a small sum of Notability, you can get one of the horrendously expensive 5carders extremely easily. No need to scrape up thousands of Tales of Terror for an Impossible Theorem, or mutter anxiously at the opp deck as the Sommelier steadfastly refuses to appear for the seventeenth week in a row!

There are other things on offer; 3-card Remote Addresses, which allow you to remove City Vices from your deck, are also pretty powerful. The 5carders are better for out-of-London activities, especially the Nadir, but if you’re eligible for many City Vices then living in a 3card is often actually the better idea.

You can also raise a Noman from the lacreous sea; the price of this increases as the season goes on, super cheap at first but then nightmarishly expensive as the snows begin to melt. If you can get a noman to last all the way to the end of the Feast of the Rose, you get the Mega Prize of using it as a talking point with Lilac. That’s not an easy task; nomen melt week by week, and the rate of dissolution increases closer to the Feast. You can heal your noman with pails of lacre, and with Tears of the Bazaar… but if you haven’t already started preparing months ago, then the chances that the thing will last that long are exceptionally slim. So, really, I don’t know why I bothered mentioning it. Hooray!

Is it worth trying to get a Dark-Carapaced Crustacean?
Debatable! Last year one of the Advent codes gave one out for free, which would make the expenditure in lacre buckets entirely worthless. Wait until after Christmas, when the Advent codes end; I recommend using a Malevolent Monkey for it, because one bucket will probably cost you more than the price of the Monkey (and you don’t lose the Monkey on failure, just a small scattering of items). Sadly, feeding your Acquaintances lacre doesn’t turn them into crustaceans, and is also actually a pretty terrible waste of a pail.

Should I eat this?
Yes. Maybe. Actually, hang on… no. THIS COULD BE YOU