Hard Candy Christmas

My 64th birthday is 10 days before Christmas. So I’m old enough to remember at least one old-timey Christmas tradition. We always received a brown paper sack filled with goodies around Christmas.

It might have been from our parents, or the school, or received at a church play or singing. There was always an orange and an apple, and some mixed nuts in the shell. That was the main time of year you saw Brazil nuts. They were hard to crack so they were usually the last nut eaten. I have come to appreciate their taste in my older years. And there was hard Christmas candy. There were waves of striped ribbon candy, so pretty to look at, but too large to fit in a tiny mouth, so they had to be broken or chomped in half. There were small hard candies with vanilla filling in them that looked like tiny satin pillows. Raspberry shaped filled candies and chocolate filled red and green striped “straws” were in the mix.

My very favorite was called “cut rock candy”. They looked like little logs with the outer layer of “bark” in varying colors, each one a brilliant shade. The center was white with a flower image that went all the way through the piece of candy. I thought they were beautiful and always wondered how they were able to make them. I still wonder how.

One explanation for the tradition of an orange in a stocking dates back to Saint Nicholas, a rich bishop. He heard of a poor family whose daughters couldn’t afford dowries, so they had no suitors. To help them, he dropped small bags of gold down their chimney, which landed in their stockings that were drying by the fireplace. An orange represents that gold. Another theory is that Christmas is the season of giving and the orange segments represent the ability to easily share with others. I like that theory the best.

The term “hard candy Christmas” refers to a time when families who didn’t have much money could only afford to give penny candy to their children at Christmas. The hard candy metaphor reminds us that life can be simultaneously hard and sweet.

May you have a sweet Christmas spent with those you love.