An Orange for Christmas
Put a navel orange in the toe of your child or grandchild’s stocking. Help them feel connected to children of the past. Let them experience the joy of eating a refreshing orange after the excitement of Christmas morning.
Every Christmas, Grandma put a giant navel orange in the toe of my brother’s and my stockings. The Christmas stockings were red felt behemoths. They were stuffed almost to bursting. It took a long time to go through all the little treasures and treats, my mother and Grandmother watching happily. When we reached the inevitable orange, Grandma would tell us about her childhood Christmases in the 1910s.
“When I was a girl, oranges weren’t available year-round, like today, and they were very dear,” Grandma said, using an old-fashioned phrase that meant costly. “An orange for Christmas was a big deal. For poor families, an orange might be the only Christmas present they could afford.”
My grandmother wasn’t wealthy growing up. Her father was a working-class Scottish immigrant. Her mother was a housewife who had to make their clothing. She was not the best seamstress, embarrassing my Grandma by having her wear ill-fitting dresses to school. Grandma was the first person in the family to graduate from college. She became an elementary school teacher. She returned to teaching after husband died at a young age.*
Oranges were expensive in the early 20th. Century New Jersey for several reasons. They had to be shipped over a thousand miles. Agriculture wasn’t mechanized, and there were no modern fertilizers and pesticides to create artificially large harvests. Refrigeration was limited to ice houses. Thus, larger orange crops would have rotted anyway. This scarcity kept prices high and made the fruit more desirable.
P for Plum Pudding, the crown of the season.”
From ‘Father Christmas’ ABC,’ illustrated by Alfred J. Johnson, 1894
In the mid 19th Century, oranges were imported to Great Britain, especially for Christmas. They were brought by cargo ships from Florida, thousands of miles away, beginning in 1845. Middle-class people and the upper classes purchased boxes of oranges. For poor people, scraping up enough money to give each child an orange was challenging. The adults could watch the kids eat them, wishing they could afford to have oranges for the adults, too. This tradition was carried forward to America.
My brother and I saved our oranges for a Christmas afternoon snack.
Like most kids, we barely slept the night before and got up earlier than usual. We felt tired when the excitement wore off, but didn’t want naps. The solution was oranges! The oranges tasted like summer sunshine against our tongues. The vitamin C in the fruit acted as a pick-me-up. My brother and I ate the oranges solemnly, thinking about all the poor children who felt lucky to get a single orange. My grandmother was a widow, and my father was absent, yet we had many presents. Mom and Grandma worked hard to give us happy memories every Christmas.
I continued the custom of navel oranges in my children’s Christmas stockings. I told the children my Grandma’s story every year. Watching the children eat their oranges, I thought about my grandmother’s struggles. Seeing an out-sized orange still makes me think of Grandma and those long-ago Christmases.
*During World War II, Ruth J. Coleman, my recently widowed Grandma, taught elementary school by day and worked as a machinist at night, all while raising three children. Her father called her “Ruthie the Riveter,” a pun on the famous Rosie the Riveter. She realized the factory job wouldn’t last forever and earned a real estate license. After the war, Grandma sold real estate to returning veterans with VA mortgages to supplement her teaching income. She worked in real estate on weekends and during school breaks for decades. Grandma only retired because her doctor forced her.
Grandma was the hardest-working person I have ever met. She rarely took a vacation and only traveled once to visit her son, my Uncle Bruce, in California. Grandma was frugal with herself and the soul of generosity to children. My mother is the same way, hard-working and kind. My mother even sold real estate as a side hustle, just like her mother. Mom retired at age 76, and only because the company closed. What extraordinary role models!