A Story for the Soul
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
I am feeling much better today. Thank you, friends. Really, I was just whining last night. But there you were anyway. My comfort book last night was the same Canadian Christmas story book I have been reading. I thought I'd share another story if you are in the mood. I chose this one because I am feeling like making things simple today.
From "Sleds, Sleighs & Snow; A Canadian Christmas Carol" edited by Anne Tempelman-Kluit
"Christmas Orange" by David Weale
Morell, Prince Edward Island, Canada
"Perhaps the greatest difference between Christmas today and Christmas "them times" is that, "them times", people were poor. Not that there aren't any poor today, but back then everyone was poor-or almost everyone. It wasn't a grinding, end-of-the-rope kind of poverty. Most everyone had food enough to eat and warm clothes to wear. The woodshed was filled with wood, the cellar with potatoes and carrots, and the pickle barrel with herring and pork. In many ways it was an era of plenty, so you might say that rural Islanders weren't poor, they just didn't have much money.
What strikes me forcibly when I speak to old people is that the scarcity of money made it possible to receive great pleasure from simple, inexpensive things. I know, for example, that for many children an orange, a simple orange, was a Christmas miracle. It was the perfect golden ball of legend and fairy tale which appeared, as if by magic, on December 25th. In that drab world of gray and brown, it shone mightily like a small sun.
The orange was a kind of incarnation of Christmas itself, the very spirit and embodiment of the Christmas season. For many Islanders the most vivid, evocative memory of that blessed time is the memory of an orange in the toe of their stocking. One woman from a large family in Morell said that in her home you were fortunate if you received a whole orange for yourself. She recalled some lean years when she received half an orange, and was happy for it.
For children who ate oatmeal porridge for breakfast virtually every day of their lives, and had molasses on bread most days in their school lunch; for children who looked at fried potatoes almost every evening for supper and considered turnip scrapings a special evening snack; for those children an orange was a marvel, something almost too wonderful and prized to be eaten-an exotic, sensuous wonder.
One woman confessed that she kept her orange for a week after Christmas, kept it in a drawer. Several times a day she would go to her hiding place and take out the orange just to fondle it, and smell it, and to anticipate joyously the pleasure which was to come. Eventually it had to be eaten: deliberately, unhurriedly, ceremoniously, and gratefully. Piece by piece, and finally the peeling-it was all eaten, and it was good..."
What are you grateful that you will have this Christmas?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20, 2005 at 8:22 AM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
9:42 AM
When my father-in-law was little, his dad bought him a train. He played with it on Xmas night. Then the next day, his dad took it back!! We find the story funny now but imagine when times are tough and you gotta do that. I'm still laughing.