Oranges 🍊
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My dad was born in late 1929. For most of his early days, the Great Depression was just daily life. When your family doesn't have much money, but everybody else living around you doesn't have much money, poor becomes a relative term. My dad never thought he was poor.
He had a roof over his head. My grandpa cut the logs and used a team of horses to drag them to Mr. Whatley's sawmill. When my dad was three, my grandpa and his brother built the original house from the floor joists to the shingles. About the only thing dad really remembered, was stomping in the mud pit, where the straw and mud were combined for the "mudcats". One of the neighbors who had a talent for building fireplaces, worked that day fashioning the cats into the fireplace and chimney. A few years later, grandpa was able to work a job where they let him have some used brick and that's what the second fireplace and chimney were built from...Same neighbor built that one.
My dad didn't go hungry during the Depression. Oh, things would get a bit monotonous at times and everything was eaten in season, but they had a big vegetable garden, a milk cow, chickens and since this was all open range, grandpa had a few head of hogs that roamed the woods. So if the cow was freshioned and the chickens were laying, at least there were a few eggs and some milk. Meat was generally a hog in the winter, an occasional chicken out of the flock or many times some kind of wild game grandpa shot. Rabbit, squirrel, duck or an occasional coon all wound up in the iron pots.
My dad had clothes to wear. His underwear might be made from flour sacks and his overalls and shirts would be sewn at home, but they were lye soup clean and his overalls carried a smoothing iron crease. Shoes? Well, those were only for winter time. Sometimes you got new ones, sometimes you got a cousin's hand-me-downs. You wore socks until you couldn't mend them anymore.
Christmas during the Depression...The one thing my dad remembered most vividly were oranges. Oranges. You'd usually get an apple in your stocking, but apples were something that was more available in the fall. Nobody had an orange tree. It was even too far north for satsumas. So it might take grandpa hewing out a few more crossties for the railroad, but grandpa was buying enough oranges for everybody to have one on Christmas morning. Dad and later his sister, would have an orange in their stocking, along with a homemade toy underneath their cedar Christmas tree.
If you had an orange and everybody was well, it was a grand Christmas, indeed.
Today, we're tremendously Blessed. We have more food than we know what to do with. We're able to fly across the country to see family and friends. We'll probably give and receive gifts we have no real use for. But stop and think for a moment about what is really important... God's Grace for mankind through the birth of Jesus, family, friends and remembrances of Christmas past. Money and status doesn't really matter, just those things which are good for us and really make us happy.
I hope you got an orange in your stocking...
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Belated Merry Christmas everyone
I grew up getting an orange in my stocking every Christmas and when the boys were younger, we always put one in theirs. Of course growing up in California my parents had an orange tree in the backyard but this makes me wonder if that’s how the tradition started with my folks
