family life, spiritual life

The Power of Oranges

JOY journal

There was a time in the 1900s — beginning by at least the Great Depression and ending sometime in the late 1980s — when brown paper bags filled with fruit, nuts and candy were a thing in the low-church world.

On the last service before Christmas Day, each person in attendance (including babies) received a bag on his way out the door. The sack was filled with one orange, one apple (usually Red Delicious), a few nuts in the shell and a handful of candy.

The last was often those chewy and alarmingly-intense peppermints that are red and white with a green tree in the middle. Sometimes, there was hard ribbon candy, a candy cane or — if the bag stuffer was feeling particularly generous — creme-filled chocolates.

During the Depression, both of my grandfathers were pastors. Their churches not being remotely high-falutin’ — as my maternal grandmother would say — they were struggling to raise five children each. Both took on a secular job to make ends meet as best they could. One worked for a railroad. One mined coal.

Those second jobs didn’t pay well, but I know they would have to have been what was paying for those paper bags and their contents during those hard, hard years. I can imagine my maternal grandmother stuffing them all, assembly-line style. This was the way she made cookies and baked bread and did nearly everything else required by a family of seven.

She would have been smiling and, most likely, praying as she stuffed.

By my own childhood, I was less than impressed, however. The apples looked good but tasted like wood pulp. The oranges were oranges. I didn’t like oranges. I had better candy on a random Tuesday in July than anything I ever saw in one of those bags. And, who wanted to actually crack walnuts?

But, my mother and grandmother remembered.

They knew a few nuts multiplied by every member of a family could form a streusel top to a pie pieced together from all those apples and juiced into flavor with an orange or two. My grandmother, who grew up in a remote area of Appalachia, could even recall a time when oranges were an exotic treat brought in by rail.

I have to imagine it, but she experienced it. Peeling an orange for the first time, the citrus oils tickling her face and the whole room filling with the very fragrance of sunshine.

Ah, the power of oranges is a strange and marvelous thing. I’m suddenly hankering for one. And some ribbon candy. And walnuts that require a cracker. And paper bags stiff enough to cause a paper cut if you don’t watch yourself.

I doubt I will ever long for a Red Delicious apple, but you just never know.

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May your Christmas be as full to bursting with God’s mercy and goodness as those bags were with love, blog friends!

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After a long career writing for local newspapers — and, on rare occasions, for publications such as The Washington Post — Nora is enjoying a second wind as an innkeeper. She still blogs and does writing projects of special interest. She lives in Appalachia with her husband and a dog named Finn, who is beside himself with joy when the family's daughters have college breaks.

15 thoughts on “The Power of Oranges”

  2. My dear cousin. I remember getting those brown bags, when I was quite young. I wasn’t impressed either. However, the story you tell about our grandmother, is real and true. Those were hard times, but are a rich tapestry of our heritage. God bless grandma who could make something out of nothing. I so loved and admired her. She was quite a lady. I hope I have some of her traits. ❤️

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  3. What a nice bit of nostalgia, Nora.

    When I was a child, no matter what else we had coming, we always had an orange in the toe of each of our stockings on Christmas morning.

    Later, when I had my own children, we would poke holes in the rinds of oranges with a fork, plug each hole with a clove, and hang the oranges by a ribbon. The fragrance of those pomanders became part of the Christmas experience. 🙂💕🍊

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  4. A lovely post, full of memories and aromas, and it touched many memories for me as well.
    Oranges always smell like Christmas to me. Back in the day when I was a kid, they simply were not available all year long, even in the larger grocery stores in rural New England, a seasonal fruit, they made a big splash at the holidays. We always found an orange and a shiny penny in the bottom of our Christmas stockings, and mom would proudly make a fruit bowl of oranges an apples, nuts in the shell, and grapes (with seeds of course). It was such a treat! Juice oranges were aplenty at that time of year too, so we would have fresh squeezed for the holiday breakfast, in little Fred Flintstone or Kraft Pimento Cheese juice glasses!

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    1. I remember those glasses!! Ours were jelly ones or some kind of pineapple cheese spread my mom liked. Ah, the joys of a simple Christmas. Hope we all somehow have a moment of that this year.

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  5. I too had the orange, apple, a few nuts in the shell and a handful of candy. And yes, it was hard ribbon candy and the ones with the Christmas tree in the middle. The only difference is that mine was in a stocking. Thanks for the memories.

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