You might have seen us mention Laura Ingalls’s Christmas orange before. (Here and here, e.g.) We have kind of an orange fixation. To us, the Little Orange In The Stocking is ripe (heh, heh) with meaning about what a gift should be, and how Christmas observances have changed.
(In light of recent rereadings, maybe we should consider the Christmas orange also as a symbol of the benefits of industry, or of our undeniable interconnectedness, and not just a simple luxury against which the character of the hardworking homesteader is illuminated. People thrive cooperatively, not individually, right? Ain’t no oranges for the Ingallses but for the railroads, after all. But we’re not trying to ponder this shit too hard.)
Our kids each get an orange in their stockings every year. We wish we could tell you they cherish them like this gloriously open-hearted kid with the banana in a bag. But they don’t. Theirs is a reaction of good-natured bafflement. Like: how did some produce get in with the gifts? Unlike their pioneer forebears, they have year-round access to abundant and varied foods from around the globe. If Laura Ingalls considered this basic-af citrus fruit a treat, any one of the comparative delicacies in our kids’ lunchroom trash bin would probably would have given her a fatal stroke. (Sriracha popcorn!? Freeze-dried bananas!? Fucking hummus!!???)
Anyway, an orange in the toe of a kid’s stocking in 2017 inspires no joy; it’s just weird. And our kids absolutely do not eat them. Their Xmas oranges roll around on the couch between scraps of wrapping paper and self-adhesive bows and other festive detritus while the kids play with their stockings’ more exciting contents, like camping sporks and Powrtabs.
So maybe it’s time to modernize this element of the ritual. Just slightly. Update it from the 1880s to, say, the early 1990s. But how? What would help make it fresh?
That’s it: Make it fresh. THE FRESHMAKER.
This year, instead of fruit, our kids are getting orange-flavored Mentos mints. These will symbolize not the distant pioneer past of the Little House books, with its problematic mythology of individual grit and self-determination — but the equally remote-seeming recent pan-European utopianism of the Mentos ads. “Picture it, kids,” we’ll say. “A world in which nothing gets to you! In which, no matter what hardships they encounter, people stay fresh, stay cool. With Mentos. Fresh — and full of life!”
None of it will make any sense to them, of course. But neither did those oranges. And at least the Mentos will get eaten.
