Here’s hoping your holiday dinner is eclipsed by the people eating it, Merry Christmas!
(PS. we’re having steaks, a great gift from some friends. What are you cooking?)
Tag Archive for 'christmas'
This is clearly a food based blog. We typically write about things you can eat. Technically, you could eat this week’s topic, but you’ll probably get a tummy ache.
Our friend (and first-commenter) Karin gave us the idea when she gave us a present of fresh all natural boiling potpourri. Potpourri, as a rule, smells like an old ladies bathroom, but when your potpourri is a bag with an orange, lemon, cranberries and cinnamon sticks, it’s pretty cool. Just slice up the citrus and boil everything in a big pot of water. It smells great, and adds skin-soothing moisture to the ridiculous dry winter air.
Orange, Lemon & 1/4 c Cranberries
1 whole nutmeg
1 teaspoon each whole cloves, whole all spice & juniper berries
Three each bay leaves and cinnamon sticks
Karin’s gift segued nicely into a problem we were having, how to decorate our Christmas tree in the post-Wilbur-is-walking world. Little-man loves to grab things and throw them over his shoulder. Glass ornaments would be terrible. So we went looking for alternatives, and found an easy recipe for baking your own ornaments.
Baked Ornaments: 2 cups flour 2 cups salt 2 cups water - stir, knead into a ball. roll to 1/4 ” thick. cut shapes with cookie cutters, poke holes in the top with a pencil (to hang them from). bake on greased cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes or until hard. let cool, add a string, and hang from your tree.
We had some friends over (hi Zoe and Moon!) and whipped up a batch of ornaments. We also did some fancy string tying with cinnamon sticks and pie tin cutting for fancy tree topping stars. We now have a safe Wilbur-proof tree. Occasionally he plays the game, undecorate-the-tree-and-leave-the-ornaments-in-the-middle-of-the-floor, but it’s safe.
Camri’s Dad sent us some oranges and tangerines from sunny Florida this week. Oranges for Christmas is one of these traditions you see thrown around a lot, so I wanted to look into how it started, but I can’t find anything.
Giving oranges on Christmas seems like a tradition that should have some documentation around it, but I can’t find a definitive explanation. I guess you really don’t need one, I mean, it’s cold, oranges are like summer, it all sort of makes sense. And yet, I feel like there’s some specific origin out there that we can say: “this is the reason why oranges are a common Christmas gift.”
There is a really corny orange fable about an orphanage at Christmas. I found three instances of it: one, two, and three. The story is different in each instance, but ends with orphans taking a slice of their Christmas oranges, combining them, and giving them to an orphan that didn’t get an orange.
There’s also a few mentions of oranges for Christmas being French in origin, but no specifics beyond that. Clementines, everyone’s favorite candy-in-a-peel, are ready for eating around the holidays, giving them the nickname “Christmas Oranges.” Which might be part of the mystery.
Clementines, as an aside, are the honeycrisps of the citrus family, both in taste (sweet!) and in history. Like the honeycrisp, the clementine is a hybrid. Unlike the honeycrisp, which was ‘created’ around ten years ago, the clementine has been around for just over 100. Interestingly though, it wasn’t until the late 90’s that Americans discovered how great clementines are. A Florida cold-snap destroyed that years orange crop. To make up for it, millions of clementines were imported from Europe. Europe had known about clementines for years.
Clementine history aside, what’s up with Christmas citrus? If you know, feel free to email us. Is there a specific origin for the tradition? Other than a bunch of orphans banding together?
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