THE CHRISTMAS ORANGE by David Weale

Perhaps the greatest difference between Christmas today and Christmas years ago is that back then people were poor. Not that there aren't any poor today, but then everyone was poor - or almost everyone. It wasn't a grinding, end-of-the-rope kind of poverty. Most everyone had food enough to eat and warm clothes to wear. The woodshed was filled with wood, the cellar with potatoes and carrots, and the pickle barrel with herring or pork. There were strings of dried apples hanging from the attic rafters, and a carcass of frozen beef hanging in the shed. In many ways it was an era of plenty, so you might say that rural Islanders weren't poor, they just didn't have much money.

What strikes me forcibly when I speak to some older people is that the scarcity of money made it possible to receive very great pleasure from simple, inexpensive things. I know, for example, that for many children an orange, a simple orange, was a Christmas miracle. It was the perfect golden ball of legend and fairy tale which appeared, as if by magic, on December 25th.

In that drab homespun world of grey and brown, it shone mightily like a small sun. According to one ancient legend, an anonymous benefactor dropped gold coins down the chimney of a poor family and they accidently fell into a stocking which was hanging near the hearth. The Christmas orange of later centuries was said to represent the gold in the toe of that stocking.

The orange was a kind of incarnation of Christmas itself, and for many Islanders, the most vivid, evocative memory of the blessed season is the memory of an orange on Christmas morning. One woman from a large family in Morell said that at her home you were fortunate if you received a whole orange for yourself. She recalled some lean years when she received half an orange, and was happy for it.

For children who ate oatmeal porridge for breakfast virtually every day of their lives, and had molasses on bread most days in their school lunch; for children who looked at fried potatoes almost every evening for supper and considered turnip scrapings a special evening snack; for these children an orange was a marvel, something almost too wonderful and prized to be eaten - an exotic, sensuous wonder.

One women confessed that she kept her orange for a week after Christmas: kept it in a drawer. Several times a day she would go to her hiding place and take out the orange just to fondle it, and smell it, and to anticipate joyously the pleasure which was to come.

Eventually it had to be eaten: deliberately, unhurriedly, ceremoniously and gratefully. Piece by piece, and finally the peeling - it was all eaten, and it was all good. All that remained was the hope that there would be another Christmas, and, if God would be so kind, another orange.