Traditions and Oranges at Christmas

One memory I have of my childhood Christmas-longings was really wanting old, special family traditions. My parents made Christmas wonderful, but we, I felt, lacked in the tradition department. There was something about our family tradition of putting our artificial tree together that lacked that Christmas magic.

One big reason for this is we kept having Christmas at different places. By my rough count, by the time I was 18, I had had 9 different Christmas morning locations.

My family moved a lot, as did my scattered extended family, so half the time Christmas was somewhere new or somewhere more convenient for everyone to travel to.

My birthday is two days after Christmas, so I have gotten to spend my birthday with my extended family in exotic locations far more than any other cousin: warm and tropical Hawaii, Florida, the Bahamas, or in the snowy mountains of California, Colorado, and North Carolina.

I have come to appreciate much of this as an adult, but as a child I also wanted traditions (can you see why I ended up a history major?).

Our family had two Christmas traditions: Swedish coffee cake and oranges in the toe of the stockings.

The Swedish coffee cake was what we’d eat Christmas morning. In my mind, we always did this, but I suppose there must have been many times when we were traveling that we did not. Also in my mind, this coffee cake was passed down from my Swedish foremothers, at some point translated into English.

So imagine my surprise a few years ago when I was going through my mother’s recipe box and found the recipe in her mother’s, my Grandma Katie, handwriting: “Swedish Coffee Cake, from The Joy of Cooking.” The Joy of Cooking? My one beloved tradition, my one connection with the old country, is from The Joy of Cooking? My mother laughed, saying she was sure we’d been making some sort of coffee cake in the family for a long time. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that our Swedish ancestors were even from that side of that family. It was more funny than sad, although I feel grateful that I discovered this in my thirties, and not as a child when I don’t think I’d have seen the humor in it.

Here’s the modified recipe that was not from my Swedish foremothers.

Paleo Christmas Coffee Cake

For Santa Lucia I make it with Cardamom, Saffron, and Vanilla. For Christmas Morning I make it with Cinnamon and Almond extract. 
1/2 cup warmed canned coconut milk (100-110 degrees F)1 TBSP Honey1 TBSP dry active yeast (2 packets)optional pinch of saffron
4 eggs1 stick (8 TBSP) butter of melted ghee (plus 2 TBSP for filling & 2 TBSP for icing)1/2 cups of sugar (plus 1 cup for filling)2 tsp ground cardamom or cinnamon (plus 1 tsp for filling)1 tsp vanilla extract or almond extract (plus 1 tsp for icing)3 cups Cassava Flour1/3 cup coconut flour1/2 cup ground walnuts or almonds (plus 1 cup for filling or sliced almonds)1 tsp salt (plus 1 tsp for filling)
1 cup raisins 1 cup chopped medjool dates
1 cup powdered sugar
1. Proof yeast by stirring dissolving honey in warm coconut milk (if using saffron heat saffron coconut milk, then cool and strain the threads) add yeast when milk and dissolved honey are 100 to 110 degrees F.
2. Place eggs, vanilla (or almond) extract and melted butter/ghee into a blender. Blend 1 minute until frothy
3. Combine cassava and coconut flours, ground nuts, sugar, spices, and salt into a bowl. Pour in egg and yeast mixture. Dough should be stiff, add more water or cassava flour until stiff. 
4. Let dough rise for 1 hour (in warm spot, about 85 degrees F)
5. Roll out dough and add sugar, spices, nuts, raisins, and dates in the middle. Roll up dough with filling (it will probably fall apart, it’s not very strong) place it rolled up into a circle in a pie or cake dish (or bundt pan), you can cut and turn pieces to make it look pretty if the dough holds. 
6. Let dough rise again in warm place
(You can keep the uncooked dough covered in the fridge for a few days and bake it right before you actually want to eat it too. Optional brush top with melted butter)
7. Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes (begin checking after 25 minutes)  
8. Once cooled frost with powdered sugar icing (1 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 tsp vanilla/almond extract, 1/4 teaspoon cardamom/cinnamon) 2 TBSP melted butter, 1 TBSP water or coconut milk)

And we also still have the tradition of the oranges.

I knew from my parents that this was something that they had growing up. Every Christmas, they’d get an orange in their stockings. It was a remnant from a time when oranges were really special, and Christmas might be the only time of year one could get them. I now realize that Christmas does correspond with the Florida citrus season, but I don’t think I had that sense of seasonal fruit as a child. I think in my mind these precious Christmas oranges were squirreled away for months and brought out only at Christmas, miraculously not completely desiccated. I loved that, just like my parents and their parents before them, in the toes of our stockings there would always be an orange connecting me to that past.

When Evan married into the family he thought the orange tradition was a little odd. Not that we had an orange in our stockings, the historian in him appreciated that, even if his own family didn’t have them. No, he said it was that everyone would exclaim about the orange, insist that we had to have an orange, and then once we pulled it out of the stocking with affection, we’d just put it directly back into the fruit bowl.

“No one eats their orange,” he said. “Well, no, I mean, we eat the Swedish coffee cake with a glass of eggnog,” I’d said. One year we got chocolate oranges, and those got a little more Christmas morning action. But for the most part, although I had never noticed it, yes, the oranges went right back into the fruit bowl after all the wrapping paper was cleaned up on Christmas morning (or sometimes even before that). A symbol, evidently, to be cherished but not to be actually eaten.

An orange in your stocking seemed like the sort of thing Laura Ingles Wilder might have had in her Little House in the Big Woods Christmas. However, when I actually searched for Laura’s Christmas orange, I found that oranges were too much of an exotic commodity even for the Ingles, and Laura doesn’t mention eating one until a fancy party in book 7 Little Town on the Prairie. Although I’m sure she would have loved and treasured hers, had she had one in her stocking next to all the nuts and candy.

One book that we’ve recently discovered as a family about Christmas oranges is An Orange for Frankie by Patricia Polacco, which is one of our very favorite Christmas books (although fair warning, a bit of a tear-jerker.) Here, the precious Christmas oranges come in by train and the father braves a snowstorm in getting them home to his family.

But the story I think of most when I think of Christmas oranges is the story that my Grandma Katie would tell. I remember her telling it to us all snuggled up on the couch, fire going, Christmas tree lit-up, dark outside and warm inside, the sounds of George Winston’s December piano music in the background. My grandma delighted to be with her family.

Then she would begin, her blue eyes sparkling, her wrinkled hands outstretched, weaving this tale of a poor boy on Christmas Eve trying to sell papers on a snowy street corner.

No one wanted the papers, no one had time for him. He grows sicker and sicker, but still no one buys the papers. And then he stumbles into the home of a family, sweet and good and very poor. They only have one Christmas orange, but they share it willingly with the little boy. Suddenly, lights from heaven come, and the truth about the little boy is revealed: he is the Christ Child come to earth and this family had room for him and cared for him and in turn received a special Christmas blessing.

I remember my grandmother’s description of the orange, the oils and the juices that came spraying out of it. I remember being able to picture the house glowing with an angel speaking God’s words of blessing over the little family. I remember thinking, would I have noticed Jesus in that small boy? Would I have shared my one precious orange with him? I hoped I would.

I recently told my mom that we needed to get my Grandma’s Christmas story about the oranges down on paper. And my mother said that she did have a very old copy of it. Evidently, my Aunt Emma had transcribed the story in school to use in a forensics competition, and my mom had the disintegrating copy. Also, she said that it wasn’t actually my grandma’s story, but one that her own grandmother used to tell. Look, here was a traditions even older than I had guessed!

So my mom took pictures of my aunt’s forensics versions and emailed them to me, and I typed it up, and had Evan edit it. I added a few transitions here and there, but kept it mostly the way that my Grandma told it. (Here it is.) Evidently, there wasn’t an angel in it, although that’s what I remember. But oddly enough my grandmother named two of her characters the same names as two of my main characters in my own story. Traditions and stories change in our memories, I suppose, but they’re can be more there than we remember.

I’m not sure that the magic is there without my longtime-preschool teacher Grandma telling it. She is a wonderful storyteller, especially when her audience is young children. But I am so glad to have her words written down, to pass it along to my children with an orange in the toe of their stockings. Even if they don’t eat it on Christmas morning because we’re too busy eating Swedish coffee cake (a modified grain-free version) and sipping eggnog (a coconut-milk version). Or maybe they will, because according to my own photos of past Christmas, I’m the sort of mom who makes them eat their Christmas quiche before coffee cake. And look there are sliced oranges there.

As a mother creating Christmas traditions, I see how quickly they form. For my kids, 6 and 3, what we did last year is already a tradition. Honestly, what we do right now is a tradition in that I think they expect that we’ll continue to do it year after year. We borrow other people’s traditions, we make our own, and we modify the ones from our childhood.

Our Christmas-longings come in many forms, but the best traditions direct our longings toward engaging the first and greatest Christmas story. We want to be connected to Christmas in our bodies, in the smells and tastes and textures that fill our homes at Christmas.

We are waiting for Christmas to come, as it has in the past, as it is coming this year, and how it will come in the glorious Second Coming one day. We do that in small ways: picture books and oranges, new little fingers plunking out Christmas carols on the piano, and the beautiful old recorded songs from our own childhood. Who knows, we might find a new tradition this year that leads us deeper into the love that came down at Christmas? May it be so.

Jackson, age six, has said to us this year, with such longing in his voice, that he wishes (spoiler alert) Santa were real. We point out that Saint Nicholas was real, he nods but he means all the north-pole-flying-reindeer-extra-presents magic. We smile, because we understand that feeling of course. Even at six, part of Christmas is longing for something more that we only grasp a glimpse of, like the flicker of a shadow. Or perhaps more that the reality of Christmas is so bright, so much light, that we cannot look at it directly, and we can only open our eyes the tiniest bit against its brightness that we long to see fully.

Did you get an orange in your stocking as child? What other Christmas traditions have you kept and created over the years?