Christmas Candy

 

I was at the grocery store today and come upon a candy display  that transported me back in time.  It was what I consider Christmas candy, although I suppose it is available all year. 

But when I was growing up, I only saw it this time of year, and the only time I remember it being in our house was right before Christmas.  On some magic day, usually a week or so before Christmas day, my granddaddy would come home from work with two or three big cardboard boxes filled with oranges, apples, nuts and Christmas candy.  For some reason, I think he got the bounty from Walt Thompson’s store on the square, although I have nothing factual to base that on.  Walt Thompson’s store was one of the last old country style groceries I remember in my hometown, with a huge wooden cheese block where he sold bologna and hoop cheese sandwiches.  There was a big glass case near the front door with jars of penny candy, creaky wooden floors and an indefinable smell that probably had something to do with the coal fueled stove he heated the old building with. 

I can remember the excitement I felt when those big boxes of holiday treats appeared near the front door.  Orange slices, coconut bon bons in pretty colors, chocolate drops, and my favorite coconut haystacks.  I never liked orange slices, but they were my daddy’s favorites.  I don’t particularly like any of these candies now and I’m not sure I ate all that many as a child.  But they meant Christmas to me, just like the smell of oranges and the sight of King Leo candy sticks.  Those were my granddaddy’s favorite and he always got at least a tin or two as gifts.  I liked the lemon flavored King Leo sticks.

The oranges were used to make my grandmother’s ambrosia, a blend of orange segments, coconut and a few maraschino cherries on top.  What people call ambrosia now has whipped topping and marshmallows added, but that’s not what I grew up with – it was just basically oranges and coconut, served in fancy little sherbert dishes that still live in my china cabinet.  My spell check just flagged “sherbert” and tried to tell me to change it to “sherbet” but I didn’t fall for it.   I always follow rabbit trails, so I had to look it up.  They are the same thing, and the spelling with the “r” is older.

There were always bags of English walnuts, and mixed nuts in the shell.  I’m not sure why we needed the English walnuts, since we had all the black walnuts we could ever want stored in baskets in our wood shed.  But I remember my mother and grandmother sitting in the living room with the nutcrackers, shelling and picking out nuts for candy, cakes and cookies.  Mama always made several jam cakes, one for us and a few as gifts for family or close friends.  She made them ahead of the holidays and stored them in a lard stand in the coldest room of the house.  I don’t have the courage to make even one jam cake, but she made a bunch, using blackberry jam from blackberries she picked in early June.  I wasn’t a big fan of jam cake, but I loved the caramel icing and always hovered around the kitchen to lick the bowl.

Then there was the ham.  I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything as good as my granddaddy’s country ham, cured with his special blend of sugar and salt and hung in the smokehouse to age until it was just right for cooking.  He boiled the ham in a lard stand – we must have had numerous lard stands at that time.  I don’t know what happened to all of them!  Then he wrapped the whole thing in an old quilt and let it “sit” overnight.  The last step involved placing the ham in a big old black roasting pan and covering it with his blend of sugar, salt, pepper and perhaps other spices before baking it in the oven.  He used to prepare several hams besides ours.  One or two went to relatives and one was served at the local KP lodge for their Christmas dinner.  That first slice was almost ceremonial, dark pink, almost red, with little flecks of white.  The flecks of white meant it was cured just right.  There was nothing to compare it to – today’s “store bought” product can’t compete.  I was talking to a friend of mine not long ago about country hams and he reminded me of something I had almost forgotten.  When the ham was down to the scrappy part and starting to dry out, my grandmother would chop every bit she could manage off the bone and grind it up for what I guess was called ham salad.  She would use an old black grinder that was probably used for grinding sausage too and mix the results with mayonnaise.   My friend Mark said he still makes it with his leftover country ham and adds pickle relish to it for sandwiches.  I don’t remember pickle relish in my grandmother’s version but it’s been a long time since I even thought of it.  I think it was one of those things that had no recipe – it just was.

All my Christmas memories do not involve food.  There was church too.  I have always attended a small country church and we always celebrated the holiday with a Christmas program.  If we had enough children, we did a play.  I think I still have copies of some of the plays we did – they were in little pamphlets that we got from somewhere.  Sometimes we did a nativity scene re-enactment, especially if we had a suitable live baby that year. Some of the babies were more suitable than others.  I remember one Christmas when the newborn Jesus was sitting up in the manger drinking from his baby bottle.  No one seemed to mind.  We dressed in the usual bathrobes, with towels on our heads, tinsel halos and aluminum foil covered angel wings. 

If sometimes the wise men wore tennis shoes or a shepherd looked more like a ninja warrior than a shepherd, or one of the angels yanked baby Jesus out of the manger, it still touched our hearts.  No one can be untouched watching a bunch of little angels and shepherds crowded around a homemade manger while the choir sings "Silent Night."

The church has an artificial tree now that we put up on the first Sunday of Advent.  But in my young days, we used a real cedar tree.  I will never forget the year my neighbor friends cut down a cedar that brushed the ceiling of the church (and our church has really, really high ceilings.  By then the adults had turned the entire thing over to us older kids and we had no adult supervision that I can remember.  Lonnie and Tony hauled this huge tree to the church right before the program and we managed to get it up and decorated with yards and yards of tinsel garland and all the ornaments we had collected over the years.  It was a sight to behold. Every person who walked in the church stopped and stared, open-mouthed.  Lonnie and I had a conversation about it a couple of weeks ago in the buffet line at the local restaurant.  I don’t remember anything about what kind of program we had that year, but I can still see that tree in all its glory.  My mama fussed at me – she disliked tinsel garland and always said we choked the tree to death with it.  After the program, everyone received a little bag with an orange, an apple, a few nuts and a candy bar.  I didn’t care much about the apple and orange, but I was always in suspense over what kind of candy bar I would get.  I don’t think it occurred to me to ask the big kids handing out the bags for the kind I liked.  We didn’t have a Christmas program last year because of Covid but we did this year.  We don’t have enough kids for a play, but we get together and sing Christmas songs.  This is the first year I remember that we didn’t have the little bags of fruit and candy.  I guess we forgot about it.  Next year I’m going to remember.  I don’t guess I can talk anyone into a live cedar tree that touches the ceiling, and someone probably has thrown away all that garland.