An Orange from Portugal: Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland

by Anne Simpson

It's often said that the main export of the Maritimes is Maritimers, and the same is true of Newfoundland. "Going down the road" is a way of life, but so is coming home for Christmas. It is tradition marked by happiness, fun, and sometimes less comfortable emotions. Given the regional penchant for yarn spinning, this common experience yields an abundance of stories.In An Orange from Portugal, editor Anne Simpson takes liberties with the concept of "story" to produce a book bursting with Christmas flavour. Many of her choices are fiction, others are memoirs, tall tales, poems, or essays, and still others defy classification. Some authors are nationally and even internationally famous, some are well known in the region, and others are published here for the first time. Spanning more than a century of seasonal writing, the collection includes a description of killing a pig aboard the sailing ship Argonauta for Christmas dinner; Hugh MacLennan"s Halifax waif who wants nothing more than for Santa to bring him a real orange, an orange from Portugal; a story by Alden Nowlan and another by Harry Bruce giving very different versions of what the animals in the barn do on Christmas Eve; a story about Jewish children hanging up their stockings; and very new work by young writers Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey. Beautiful poems by Lynn Davies, Milton Acorn and others leaven the collection for readers of all persuasions. Other authors Wayne Johnston, Mary Pratt, David Adams Richards, Carol Bruneau, Wilfred Grenfeld, L.M. Montgomery, Paul Bowdring, Grace Ladd, Herb Curtis, Joan Clark, Ernest Buckler, Rhoda Graser, Bert Batstone, Elisabeth Harvor, David Weale, Charles G.D. Roberts, Ronald F. Hawkins, Mark Jarman, Elsie Charles Basque, Richard Cumyn, Herménégilde Chiasson, Stan Dragland, Alistair MacLeod, and Bernice Morgan.An Orange from Portugal is a Christmas feast, with the scent of turkey and the sound of laughter wafting from the kitchen, and a flurry of snow outside the window.

Genres: Christmas, Short Stories

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2003

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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 me) 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.

[Kristin Maillard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like the writing of Wayne Johnston (who edited and contributed to this collection) and I love Christmas stories and lore, but I read the first four stories and just felt "Meh" about it so I returned it to the library.

[Nada Loughead · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my review at https://canadiancookbooks.ca/an-orang...

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple of years ago, I was looking for Christmas-themed books on Amazon, and came across this title. Now, I am fond of Canada in general, but I have truly fallen in love with Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. The idea of a book of Christmas stories from this area was so exciting to me! However, rather than buy and read the book then, I just kept it in my shopping cart. I'm not sure why, but this year, I decided it was time to buy it. I'm so glad that I did!

One thing that frustrates me is that there are so many good writers published in Canada that we here in the States either never hear about, or whose work is really difficult to track down at bookstores or libraries. Please note that I am not saying that all Canadian writers are wonderful, any more than I would say that all American writers are wonderful - just that there's plenty of worthwhile Canadian literature that's ridiculously hard to find when they are our northern border neighbor.

Anyway, this collection of stories is really enjoyable. Some are based on myth and tradition, some are poems, and some personal reflections. And of course, just plain, regular fiction. The best thing was that none of them seemed terribly formulaic, or even manipulatively sentimental. It was fascinating to read about various practices, beliefs, and traditions of the populations of these areas, that in some ways were so familiar, but not really.

I can see myself going back and reading these stories again and again at later Christmastimes. They were absolutely perfect for this time of year, and some of them I think would be amazing read aloud.

I highly recommend this book to those who like Christmas-themed stories.

[Emmkay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perfect for Christmas reading, a well-selected anthology of tales from the Maritimes and Newfoundland, with a smattering of poems as well. As ever with anthologies, some were more to my taste than others: I especially appreciated "The Kneeling of the Cattle" by Alden Nowlan, "The Far-Away Present" by Mary Pratt, "Cougar" by Mark Jarman, and "What Possessed Him" by Michael Crummey. A nice mix of the cozy and the more dark and melancholy.

[Anne Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title appealed to me. My mother always put an orange in the toe of our Christmas stockings. The stories and poems are a mixed bag, overall more melancholy than uplifting - why is that with holiday tales?