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Treasures from Japan

By Daniel Lavoie - a Christmas story
1997 Editions Québec Amérique Inc.
From the book "Le Noël des artistes" by Marc Deulceux.

Home was the plains. When I was small it was my playground! I had even found the skull of a bison, bleached by the sun, with a bullet inside it. This was the Great Plains. The winter wind gathered speed on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains and froze 1,500 km of flat countryside before arriving at my home right in the East. There, my grandfather had built a house. It had been there almost 100 years, from my village one could see it. In this part of the countryside one sees all the other houses as well for 10 km around. It's flat and trees are a rarity.

In winter everything is completely white, it's also extremely cold for ages! But being little I didn't question it. I was impatient for it to become white, to get cold and, above all, impatient for Christmas.

At home Christmas began towards the end of November when Mrs Marguerite gathered her choir together again: several children, 2 nuns from the convent and several villagers known to have good voices. They rehearsed the hymns for the midnight mass.

Christmas began in earnest at the beginning of December when my Father's village shop took delivery of a cargo of fir trees from Ontario. I helped unpack the consignments of sweets, of toys and of ribbons, as well as all the wonderful little things, which arrived with us but once a year. Christmas began for real when the delivery lorry, which stopped outside the shop once a week at last brought us the "Christmas oranges". In their little box of balsawood, each discreetly hidden in orange tissue paper, they had crossed the Pacific by boat and the Great snow covered Plains to end their travels in my Father's shop. Earlier in the year, the customers had placed their orders for one or two little boxes, according to their means.

I had the enormous privilege of being the first to lift a lid, to rummage through the tissue paper to extract these sugared jewels. The skin was as soft as the fingers of a small child that I succeeded in lifting them out without any trouble. I inhaled this aroma, and this taste that came from the other side of the world. More than the Christmas tree, the roast turkey or my Mother's pie, the smell of Japanese satsumas was Christmas.

During the two weeks which made up the holiday, my brothers, my sisters and I had the right to one satsuma a day. Happily, I always succeeded in having two or three extra. Christmas day they were freely available until stocks ran out. My Father always ordered several boxes beyond those needed for the customers, we were certain to find a well decorated box on our return from midnight mass. It was clementines that replaced the satsumas of my childhood. They were good but couldn't equal the taste and scent of the little Japanese oranges. Now and then I find them in Chinatown. The boxes are now made of cardboard but the tissue paper is still there. The scent given off as soon as the skin is broken always succeeds in sending me back to days long passed! In those days, when I was a youngster and where I supervised the unloading of the lorry whilst praying to the heavens that my Father had got his calculations all wrong and had ordered, by mistake, tons and tons of satsumas.