Welcome to my foray into the magical and mystical world of bloggery.
And please, don’t take anything you see here too seriously. This is my take of the world, the way I see it. If I come off a little aggressive or arrogant sometimes it is just that there is no one’s opinion I value higher than my own. There is no one I had rather love to hear voice those opinions than…well, me.
I treasure truth over illusion, God over chaos and fun over the grim outlook that seems to permeate so much of the world today. So sit back and leave the driving to me. Check your prejudices at the door and embrace mine.
Come on in and have a look around
Today's Hogwash:
Ah, Christmas, what a wonderful time of the year.
Chestnuts roasting, what is a Chestnut anyway? Down here in Texas we have real nuts. Okay, you Yankees, I’m not talking about crazy people, I’m talking about the kinds that grow inside of shells and you can eat without having cannibalistic tendencies.
But, back on point, we Texans have peanuts, the blue-collar nut and, of course, the king of nuts, the pecan. That is pronounced, “Pee-con” not “Pee-can” . I love pecans and have very fond memories from my childhood of picking pecans “on the shares”. On the shares meant that we would be permitted to go into someone’s pecan orchard and pick pecans. You get to keep half of the pecans you pick and you give half to the orchard owner. I get a share and the owner gets a share, therefore-On the shares” or “on the halves” as some say.
Of course there were other ways to get your pecans. You could buy them, but unlike today, back when I was a lad, we never paid out money for something you could get for just a little work. IT was actually fun for us. Whole families would make an outing of it or me and a couple of buddies would go spend all morning thrashing and picking pecans.
Now I guess I need to explain ”thrashing” to you city types. Thrashing is where you take the longest pole you can find, usually a cane pole, and bang it about the pecan tree’s limbs so any pecans that are mature but have not yet fallen to the ground will come down, thereby increasing you harvest. Some orchards even supplied the cane poles. Of course, commercial pickers use an attachment for tractors and do this mechanically. Doesn’t sound like as much fun unless you were the one driving the tractor. There has always been a love affair between boys and tractors, at least, out in the country. I remember some folks would pick their pecans and then pay a reduced price, but as I said, we never spent money unless we had to back then.
As I recall, we had three kinds of pecans around my neck of the woods. I don’t know the technical name of the species but we called them, Regular, Soft-shell and, Pateens. Regulars were a little bigger than a large man’s thumb from the tip to the first joint and were the dickens to shell by hand, you know, taking two pecans in your hand and squeezing them together until one of them cracked.
Pateens were about the size of a normal-sized man’s little finger from the tip to the first joint and were a little easier to crack but it took a truckload of then in the shell to get enough shelled nuts to make a pie. Permit me to interject here that my grandmother on my father’s side made us many a pie made for these tiny rascals and we found the extra hard work needed to gather enough for a pie was well worth it.
The best pecans were the soft-shell. They were the size of a man’s thumb from the knuckle to the tip and were so easy to crack that we sometimes called them “Paper-shell pecans”. These were usually found at commercial farms or private orchards but every once in a while we would talk a neighbor who might have such a tree to let us pick them on the shares.
Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without pecans. Pecans, children and the Christmas story read around the fire. Yeah, I said read. Surely you remember when we used to read books. That was back in the days before we spent so much of our time in front of the “idiot box”, “Devils Eye” or” Brain-drain Machine” (that’s “TV” for you folks in Brucevulle-Eddy).
The Christmas story we read was not the one about Ralphie Parker and his quest to convince his parents he needs an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model BB rifle with a compass in the stock for Christmas. I am talking about the Christmas story found in the Bible, Luke 2:1-20.
Now, my own memories of Christmases long past include hanging up one of dad’s clean socks (He had bigger feet than me) and on Christmas morning finding it had been filled with the exact same thing every year, an apple, an orange, a couple of Brazil nuts (Now there is a nut with an almost impenetrable shell), pecans and that awful ribbon candy they bought at the Mexican candy factory for half price because it was what they couldn’t sell four years ago. Still, we always looked forward to the tradition.
Each Christmas Eve, we would gather in the living room (Those were the days before anyone had a “family room” and only newer houses had “Dens”). My dad or my grandfather would read the story of Christ’s birth and we all smiled a warm sweet smile at the thought of God sending his son to earth as a little baby.
Kids dressed in PJ’s, wrapping paper everywhere, family and friends chatting warmly. The younger children playing outside with their Christmas bounty and a dinner on the table fit for any king, president or potentate. After stuffing ourselves beyond reason, came naps on the couches for the older men, football on TV for the young men, and tackle football out in the yard for the boys.
With my girls all gone to homes of their own, it’s nice they still come see their old dad at Christmas time. We make new memories every year and yet those memories never replace the older ones, they are simple added on to make the look back even sweeter.
Merry Christmas to all and please pause to remember the reason we have a Christmas season, Christ the Savior was born.
bravenet.com