How do I love thee? Let me count the ways;
I love the way you peel so easily.
I love the way the peel comes off in one piece like an elephant face.
I love the way you separate into bite-sized pieces.
I love the smell of you.
I love your sweet, tangy taste.
I love the way you taste in yogurt.
I love the way you’re so portable.
I love the fact that you taste so good AND you’re good for me.
Anybody got anything else Christmas-y that they just loooove?
Chestnuts!
Today I roasted a batch in the oven, then sauted them in butter, then roasted them again in the skillet with kosher salt and cinnamon.
Mmmmmmm. So good.
A guilty pleasure. That overswetened, make-believe eggnog in the dairy section this month.
I know, I know it’s not eggnog, and yes I know how to make and love home made too. But that sweet, egg-ish taste, fresh and direct from the container?
Ahhhh…
Oh sweet orange, you have such a-peel,
Your rind so firm and bright,
Your succulent flesh makes a nice meal,
That I’m sure’ll sit just right.
Yours is better than mine, AFG. You’re so creative.
You know, I’ve never had roasted chestnuts. I think they’re available in the stores here, but I wouldn’t know what to do with them.
Eat 'em?
:eek:
Did this give anyone else a very disturbing visual???
You can eat a Christmas orange? I thought they just added heft and made the toe of the stocking look full.
My grandmother always had thin mints for the holidays. They’re like Peppermint Patties, but about the size of a half dollar and really thin. It was the only time I’d have them. I’d eat a years worth when she did have them, but they were specifically for the holidays.
When I saw the title my first thought was of chocolate oranges, not the kind that grow on trees! Those are what I remember most from Christmases past – Terry’s Chocolate Oranges, to be exact. 
They’re available in my local grocery store and so I’ve taken to eating them throughout the year, but they still always remind me of Christmas.
Mmmm, chocolate orange…
featherlou - we don’t get mandarins here. Woe! They get Clementines, which are hit-and-miss, and have seeds.
What the heck is a Christmas orange, and what makes it so different than an orange gotten in, say, July?
When my dad was a sharecropper’s kid in the ass end of Georgia growing up, they got oranges in their stockings and it was exciting. They were thrilled. It was a treat.
Thankfully, my mom stopped putting oranges in stockings a while back, because nobody ever ate them. How things change!
Little tangerine/clementine/tangelo or other small cousin of the orange. Santa brings them to some kids but not to others. Nobody knows why.
Growing up we never did chestnuts or eggnog. I still don’t. But the Christmas oranges…yeah, I do those.
It’s become a tradition to put an orange and/or an apple into a Christmas stocking. I just did a quick search for when this tradition started, but all I could find was a mention of a story about St. Nicholas:
Passing through a village, the Saint heard tell of a very poor man who had three unmarried daughters. With no money for a dowry, he knew they would remain at home as spinsters. St. Nicholas vistited their house & noticed that the sisters had hung up their stockings to dry by the chimney.
The next day, the girls retrieved their leggings and discovered that a lump of gold had been placed in each stocking: a fine dowry, indeed.
Fable? Perhaps. But that’s folklore for you! So there’s speculation that the orange in the stocking represents that charitable lump of gold. Also, oranges would have been very exotic, and something that could only have been afforded once a year.
Store-bought Pfeffernusse is always a holiday treat. Coming from a southern culture, I never knew about it until after college. Now it’s one of the things I look for at the grocery store when that time of year rolls around.
In Western Canada, where featherlou lives, we get Mandarin oranges. They’re sorta like Clementines. They’re seedless and easy-to-peel and always very sweet and nice. And, only available around Christmas time, usually.
The clementines we get here are seedless (I’ve always thought mandarins and clementines were the same thing). And SO good. I brought three with me to work today and I’ve got one left. I was thrilled when those little crates showed up in the store early this year!
Pepperkaker.
Pepperkaker pepperkaker pepperkaker pepperkaker pepperkaker pepperkaker!
Yeah, Ginger’s got it right - it’s the Mandarin oranges that I live for. We get Clementine’s here occasionally, too, but they’re no Mandarin orange. There’s a certain taste to a Mandarin that no other orange can duplicate.
{Note to self- look into pepperkaker}