An Orange from Portugal: Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland
“Last time the old man was home I seed some oranges in a store window, but he wouldn't get me one because if he buys stuff in stores he can't go on being a seaman. To be a seaman you got to wash out your insides with rum every day and rum costs lots of money. Anyhow, store oranges ain't real.”
“How do you know they aren't?”
“My old man says so. He's been in Portugal and he picks real ones off trees. That's where they come from. Not from stores. Only my old man and the people who live in Portugal has ever ett real oranges.”
As my parents (and, I suppose, my brothers and I) are Maritimers, I always found an orange in the toe of my stocking on Christmas morning, even if they aren't so hard to come by anymore. So naturally, the image of the curling orange peel on the cover of this book – as well as the subtitle “Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland” – made a sentimental pull at me to pick up An Orange from Portugal and squeeze in some reading on this busy week leading up to Christmas. Inside, I discovered fictional stories, personal essays, poems and old letters, and repeatedly, they made me nostalgic for a time and place that was never really mine. This book features plenty of authors who are familiar to me – David Adams Richards is hilarious in The Tale of a Tree and Lisa Moore is unsurprisingly outstanding with The Chalice – and I discovered new authors that I'll want to spend more time with. In particular, Ernest Buckler had me choking up over a child's view of an old-timey Yuletide in The Still of Christmas:
The room was snug with the bunching of the furniture and the little splendour of eating there on a weekday. And when Martha held the match to the lamp wick, all at once the yellow lamplight soft-shadowed their faces (with the blood running warm in them after being out in the cold) like a flood and gathered the room all in from outside the windows. It touched the tree and the hemlock and the great red ball with the flaw no one could ever notice, like a soft breath added to the room's heart: went out and came back with a kind of smile. The smell of the tree grew suddenly and the memory of the smell of the oranges and the feel of the nuts. In that instant suddenly, ecstatically, bustingly, buoyantly, enclosingly, sharply, safely, stingingly, watchfully, batedly, mountingly, softly, ever so softly, it was Christmas Eve.
That story isn't maudlin, but I was consistently touched by the little moments of truth in it. On the other hand, I loved the voice of the very adult narrator who encounters a dangerous cat while walking in the woods in search of a Christmas tree in Cougar:
I have no real job and no irons in the fire and no cash on the barrelhead and there are no mills hiring and no king salmon run past our window. No one in Bedford Falls brings me baskets of money, and the only job I can wrangle is burying pigs for the university lady, but I am back in the world, and I am going to have some good steaming chowder and after that a good beer, and maybe a crossword puzzle in ink, as I am careful and reckless. And maybe some screaming Buffalo wings – suicide wings we used to call them – and maybe clams in a metal bucket and another beer and maybe a bath with some salt for my multiple slashes from the cat, and her big soft bed with the creaking filigree headboard rattling Morse code to the wall.
Plenty of children get oranges in their stockings in these stories, I learned why one should never go spying on the cattle to learn if they really do speak human language on Christmas Eve, and I was spooked by a story of a mysterious mummer (and, honestly, I've been spooked every time a Newfie author writes of their mummer tradition; at least there was no nail-toothed Horse Chops to be found here). This was the perfect collection to get me in the Christmas spirit – even if the details would have been more familiar to my grandparents than to me – and I'll need to remember to look for some real oranges from Portugal for the stockings of my own family this year.
