Juice worth the squeeze

Kooky citrus could serve as development bulwark

Specimens submitted for judging at the Southeastern Citrus Expo on November 19/ Photos by Hanna Raskin

How lovely is an orange, sweet and yellow,

Crammed in a stocking ripe with Christmas joy

Candies and nuts and apples red and mellow

And every kind of toy.

God must have nursed a luscious thought within His mind

When He made oranges for humankind!

--Angela Morgan¹, “Christmas Orange” (1926)

Now is the season for fuddy-duddies to reflect on the time when children waited anxiously all year to find a single orange in the toe of a shared Christmas stocking. In the words of a modern storybook, “They would save it for several days, admiring it, feeling it, loving it, and contemplating the moment when they would eat it.”

A review of contemporary news accounts and fictional literature shows this practice was hardly the hallowed tradition it’s become in popular culture. As early as 1855, a character in one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sketches had to chide her niece and nephew not to laugh at a woman who thought an orange was a proper Christmas present.

Still, oranges played an important part in the holiday throughout the nineteenth century. December was when trains showed up in Southern cities with cases of citrus from Seville, Havana, and other faraway tropical places. As a result, Southerners trimmed their trees with mandarins, brandied oranges for punch, and stirred orange peel into cake batter.

Oranges were festive. Oranges were special.

An enthusiastic group of Southeastern citrus researchers and growers would like to make them that way again.