Christmas Fruit

We received some beautiful citrus fruit from Dad and Barb this week. Thank you. It made me feel nostalgic as I reminisced about some fond childhood memories. Every year there was a Christmas party at my Grandparents house on Christmas Eve. My father's parents. We called them Mammy and Papa....and I don't know why. Its just what we (my sister and I) called them for as long as I can remember.

The Christmas Eve party was almost as big a deal as Christmas Day. We always had special Christmas party dresses. There was a huge potluck supper (Mammy and Papa always had breakfast, dinner and supper. Lunch was not a word they ever used). And a large pan of Mammy's cornbread dressing, which is etched forever in my memory as the most perfect food in the whole world. I never learned to make it. After everyone ate like pigs, we would all gather around the tree (which actually had the old-fashioned bubble lights) and my Uncle Fred, the fun uncle that we all loved best, would play Santa and hand out the mountains of gifts from Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles and Cousins. It was obscene how many gifts we opened on that night every single year.

After the party started to wind down, my sister and I would curl up with Papa and beg him to tell us about how Christmas was when he was a young boy. Papa was a natural storyteller. He had a gift. And he never failed to tell us a story whenever we requested one. We would sit around the Christmas tree and see all of these baskets of fruit. Every year people from their church, and from the community would bestow fruit baskets upon Mammy and Papa. It was a tradition. There would be sometimes upwards of a dozen baskets or more, some huge and grand and tied up with beautiful ribbon. And some more modest with one of those little premade bows stuck on top. But they were all displayed proudly around the room like natural parts of the holiday decorations.

And then Papa would begin to tell us how Santa, back in his day, put only 1 gift under the tree for each child. It was usually a toy. And then Santa filled their stockinga. It was the stocking that Papa liked to tell us about the most. He couldn't remember the details of exactly what toys he got, but he could recall that every single year Santa left him, and his brothers 1 banana and 1 orange a piece. There were also some nuts and candies, but the fruit was their favorite part.
Back then, which would have been the very early 1900's, transportation was slow enough that getting perishable things like fruit from one place to another was hard work. Especially out in the rural area that Papa grew up in. You didn't just walk down to the corner market and pick up oranges and bananas. Fruit was limited to what grew locally, and there was nothing tropical about upstate South Carolina.

He told us how he would rip open that banana and have it for Christmas breakfast. That sweet exotic flavor, so rare and unlike anything he ate during the rest of the year defined Christmas to him. And the orange would be peeled just a little at a time and eaten in small sections slowly to try and make it last for the entire day. And that was it. 1 banana and 1 orange for an entire year. I remember how my sister and I would be stunned by that revelation every single time that he told the tale. Can you even imagine? And then he would laugh and remark to us how everything changes with time. He would look around at all those fruit baskets on display and say that now he had more fruit than he could even begin to eat. But you know, I think that it was still special to him. As far as I can recall, Mammy and Papa never opened a single one of those baskets until Christmas morning, like it was unthinkable not to wait and savor it on that special day.

And opening our boxes of fruit, and smelling the fresh clean scent of citrus brought all of that back to me. Happy memories of Christmas past. I hope Papa is somewhere smiling as I take my first bite of a juicy Christmas orange. And no, I didn't wait for Christmas day.....