The following essay was broadcast in early December 2006 on UMass Lowell’s Sunrise radio program (WUML-FM, 91.5).–PM

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Oranges at Christmas

This week, my wife bought a bag of small navel oranges at Market Basket, the first of these babies for the season. When I opened the plastic bag the twelve baseball-sized oranges spilled over the counter and the scent of orange oil filled the kitchen. I look forward to the first seedless oranges from the groves along the Pacific and Gulf coasts. If I didn’t know better, I’d picture ripe oranges pulling down the fronds of palm trees in the sun.

I was lucky enough to live in Southern California one year during the growing season. One night driving south on the San Diego Freeway near the old mission of San Juan Capistrano, I passed a vast orange grove in blossom, the perfume of orange flowers ten times more powerful than the apple blossoms I’d grown up with in the Merrimack Valley. Some of the blooming orange trees still had fruit on their branches. The idea of walking into a back yard in Laguna Beach and picking an orange or a lemon off a tree seemed impossibly exotic to a New Englander. A pear or a peach, yes, but tropical fruit along the driveway? No way.

The special bounty of a giant navel orange from far away probably explains why my parents thought of it as enough of a gift to stuff a couple in Christmas stockings for my brothers and me when we were young. On Christmas morning you’d find one or two in the stocking among small toys and candy canes.

The oranges at Christmas come to us by way of Saint Nicholas, yes, the same as in “the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there,” according to the St. Nicholas Center on the web. The original Nicholas was a fourth-century Christian in what is now southern Turkey who was known for helping the poor. One legend has nocturnal Nicholas throwing small bags of gold through open windows into the shoes of young women who needed dowries to get married. This is the source of the Christmas stocking tradition—those long red socks hung by the fireplace the night before Christmas in hope of being filled with gifts by morning. Nicholas’s bag of gold became a ball of gold as the story evolved in Europe—and the ball of gold turned into an orange stuffed into the toe of the stocking. There it is.

In the Canadian west there’s an age-old Christmas tradition beginning with the delivery of the first load of mandarin oranges from Japan to British Columbia. The Vancouver festival combines Santa Claus and Japanese dancers. Bright as light bulbs on the kitchen table, oranges promise sunshine as late December daylight shrinks in the shortest days of the year. With each successive winter week the navel oranges from California get bigger and better, until the harvest season passes. Then it’s back to the Valencias from Florida, the oranges with seeds, the juice fruit, not the eating oranges with the thick spongy skin that peels off like wrapping.

So, the oranges are old gold, and the fruit is a nod to Saint Nick. People sometimes do things because they’ve always done them—or they may do things for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with the reason other people do those same things. My parents never talked about Nicholas and his golden gifts seventeen hundred years ago. They never spoke about kids in Europe who left shoes and socks by the fireplace on Christmas Eve hundreds of years later. In the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when my parents were growing up in Lowell, an orange was a treat in a poor family. They were giving my brothers and me their own kind of gold when they put oranges in our Christmas stockings. I told my son he’d get one this year if we’re lucky.

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—Paul Marion (c) 2006