  Mystery
This week: The Mystery of the Orange Edited by: Fyn  
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Christmas is not as much about opening our presents
as opening our hearts.~ Janice Maeditere
The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree:
the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in
each other.~ Burton Hillis
A big orange and some fresh pine boughs and 'Silent
Night' are all I need, and cookies, of course. They are
the strings that when I pull on them I pull up the complete
glittering storybook Christmases of my childhood. ~ Garrison Keillor
When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out - because that's what's inside.
When you are squeezed, what comes out is what is inside. ~ Wayne Dyer
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When I was a small child, I always got an orange in the toe of my stocking. Sometimes, when times were tough, there was little else. But in the depths of winter, that orange was a rare and special treat. I'd eat a section every day and made it last. My brother devoured his in seconds. It was a certainty in an uncertain world. I knew that while I might not get the doll I wanted or the book I was longing to read, that there would be an orange in the toe of my stocking.
But why an orange?
There are oral traditions that tell of it starting way back when St. Nicholas overheard three maidens complaining that they'd never get married because they had no dowries and that he tossed bags of gold into the house and they landed in the girls' stockings that were drying by the fire. The orange supposedly came to represent the bags of gold. Another story tells of a prisoner in Auschwitz who found the orange in his bleak black and white world of a winter concentration camp and of how it was his miracle of hope.
My grandmother told me our own family's particular reasoning behind it. When my mother was little and the Great Depression had everyone living a life that was defined by the word 'frugal,' winter was an especially tough time. Fresh fruit in winter was, as my mother would tell it, something only 'the rich kids got.' She was not a member of a 'rich' family as her dad worked shoveling coal and her mother tended children as a nanny for a family who lived in the mansion up on the hill.
My mom lived in a small house and my grandmother would tell me that it was much better that way as it took less to heat it in the winter. My mother used to say how she'd walk by the 'big houses up on the hill' and dream of living in one because they all had at least three or four chimneys. It was the era of 'Use it up; wear it out, make it do or do without.' My mother would wear dresses the little girls my grandmother worked for had grown out of and would magnanimously give to her to give to her little girl. My mother hated wearing those cast off dresses and coats. It didn't matter to her that without them she would have had no warm coat to wear during the frigid New England winter. It didn't matter that the dresses were beautiful. She lived in a house with only one chimney and it was across town and the tracks from the big, beautiful homes on the hill.
Christmas would come and in my mother's stocking would always be one orange. This was not a cheap commodity back then and my grandmother would work an entire day to cover the cost of the three oranges in their family's stockings. They were expensive because they had to be trucked or railed all the way across the country. But there was always the oranges no matter what.
As my Grandmother explained it to me, it meant that if only for the day, for those few moments that not matter what one had and what one did not have, that the little bit of sunshine in that orange made one richer than anyone else. There was love and joy in each drop of juice. There was God's sunlight in the bright orange skin. There was sweetness and health in the eating of the orange in a time when getting enough Vitamin C was an issue.
Having that orange in the middle of the cold, dark winter meant you were rich!
Sometime after my grandmother first told me the Orange Tales (as I called them) she moved to a big house, high on a hill in North Adams, MA and we moved there with her. There were fireplaces in each of the seven bedrooms, in the kitchen and in both the living room and the dining room. I remember thinking she must be the richest woman in the world. I also remember it was my job to fill all the log carriers with wood for each and every fireplace. It was my brother's job to chop all the wood. We were paid a penny a piece (he for each log chopped) and me for lugging them all inside. The bedrooms were all on the third floor. The money was put in a jar to save for Christmas. We had to spend every penny of it on presents for the family. I learned early on that a present was much more than a simple 'boughten' gift. There was work, sweat and a goodly number of splinters bound to each and every one.
I always had that orange in the toe of my stocking. As did and do my children (grown they may be) as well as all the grandkids. We all are experiencing tough times and there are no 'big ticket' items in the beautifully wrapped gifts accumulating beneath our tree. There is love. And there will be an orange in the toe of each stocking. It is a continuing on of a tradition. It is important to remember what the gifts stood for once upon a time. It is both a reminder and a promise.
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jgb  writes: Informative, especially the part about adding interuptions to your dialogue when writing.
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Mystery: November 29, 2011 Issue [#4745]
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