Christmas past

Yesterday when we were shopping for food for the Christmas guests, I picked up a bag of tangerines. Tangerines are part of Christmas for me. They are one of those things that one didn't get year round back when, but at Christmas, there they were. Easy to peel with your fingers, even when you are just a kid, and great tasting. For some people, Christmas may have meant gingerbread, but for me it was tangerines.

And bowls of nuts. Daddy would buy a bag of mixed nuts and drag out the nutcracker -- not an ornamental one, but a real finger-crusher. So Brazil nuts, which I didn't particularly like, are a Christmas thing, but one I am willing to bypass.

At some point he would buy a huge peppermint stick, a foot long and several inches in diameter (at least in my memory) -- so big that he would have to crack it with a hammer to get pieces small enough for us to suck on. For some reason I associate the big peppermint stick with Gordon's Drug Store in Huntsville. I guess he used to buy them there.

Ribbon candy and other hard candies. I know Dolly Parton has a song about a hard candy Christmas, and I think the song is about hard times not getting you down. But I don't know that I ever thought of hard candy at Christmas as a sign that things were bad. I thought it was just a sign that it was Christmas. Hard candy was always around, I guess, but ribbon candy was another thing you didn't get year round.

I'm sure there are other things. Of course, there was the hunt for the little Christmas ornament that hung on the tree every year since I was born (and therefore, every Christmas for Ted, too). There was the gift exchange at school with classmates and the one with cousins whose names we had drawn. I still recall when the limit on gifts (at least at school) was a dollar, and you could actually buy a toy that someone might want to play with for a buck. I don't remember any in particular that I got, but I do remember getting a small printing set (blocks with tiny rubber letters and ink) for a classmate whose last name was Prentice. I think more often than not I wound up with a Christmas tree-shaped box with a variety of Lifesavers flavors. Not too imaginative, but well within the budget, and fun in its own way. So I suppose I need to add unusual Lifesaver flavors to the childhood taste of Christmas.

There were other flavors -- divinity and chocolate-covered cherries come to mind -- but these might show up at other times, too. The cherries were a sort of Valentine's Day thing, since that happened to come along right before Washington's Birthday and the cherry tree association, I guess. Those Whitman Samplers and such candies were not just for Christmas, but I think Christmas was probably the season when candy -- a bit of a treat the rest of the year -- was more common (and permitted).

Now you can get tangerines anytime -- but they aren't as good as those were back then. (A sure sign I am getting old.) And the Dells is filled with candy stores where every day you can get more ribbon candy than you can shake a giant peppermint stick at. But it's not quite the same. I don't imagine any kid would be happy to get a ninety-eight cent rubber stamp kit when his computer will print in full color without smearing. And a box of Lifesavers as a present?

But there was a time, not so long ago, when even a hard candy Christmas was still magic.