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Christmas recollections make warm memories

Living ornaments in trees deck the lawn

The trees around the lawn may be bare in December, but you can adorn them with lots of color and activity. All you have to do is keep the feeders filled with bird seed and keep plenty of fresh water in the bird baths. Empty the ice each morning from the baths and refill with fresh water when temperatures rise above freezing. You can attract colorful birds such as cardinals, junkos, blue jays, chickadees, mocking birds and sparrows. You may even attract a few bluebirds and visiting crows. Keep feeders and baths filled each day and you can enjoy living ornaments on bare limbs celebrating the season of Christmas.

Candy orange slices an old-fashioned favorite

Orange candy slices are a favorite old-fashioned gummy treat that have been around for well over 100 years. Most of them sold today are individually wrapped and sold from wooden kegs in country stores in clear plastic wrap or plastic pound bags. They still have that distinctive orange flavor and you can usually find them all during the year but especially at Christmas. Today, you can find not only orange slices but flavors of lemon, cherry and lime slices.

Making old-fashioned orange slice pound cake

This cake recipe is a taste of old-fashioned orange slice goodness. It has a lot of ingredients but it is a great tasting cake with plenty of flavor. To prepare this cake, you will need two sticks of light margarine, two cups of sugar, four large eggs, one cup of golden seedless raisins, one cup chopped pecans, one pound of candy orange slices (cut into very tiny pieces), three and half cups plain flour, one teaspoon of baking powder, half cup buttermilk, one teaspoon orange extract, two cups 10x powdered sugar, one can flaked coconut and one cup of orange juice. Cream margarine and sugar. Add eggs one at a time and set aside. Dredge golden raisins, chopped pecans and orange slice pieces in one cup of plain flour. Dissolve the baking powder in the buttermilk. Mix the other two and a half cups of flour, and all the other ingredients except the orange juice and powdered sugar. Grease and flour a tube pan and then line bottom of pan with a layer of waxed paper and grease and flour the waxed paper. Make sure sides of pan and tube are well-greased and floured. Bake at 300 degrees for two hours or until cake springs back when touched. Cool for at least 45 minutes and remove from the pan. Mix the cup of orange juice and two cups of powdered sugar and pour over the cake. Let cake stand in a covered cake container over night. It will yield twenty servings. Decorate with candy orange slices.

The old-fashioned sticky taste of peanut brittle

Peanut brittle has the taste of an old-fashioned Christmas. We remember our Aunt Florence making this concoction as a treat at Christmas when were were kids. She made hers with eastern North Carolina parched peanuts. She gathered them from fields after the harvest. After the harvest, lose peanuts would be lying all over the fields and farmers would allow neighbors to help themselves to them. Aunt Florence used Karo corn syrup and a double portion of parched peanuts in her brittle. Commercial peanut brittle in the 1950s was also very sticky. There is an improvement in 21st century peanut brittle because it has a corn starch coating and is not sticky but crisp. Some of today’s best is produced in Norfolk, Virginia by Old Dominion peanut company. Virginia is one of America’s largest peanut growers along with Georgia. Suffolk, Virginia has a large peanut storage facility for Planter’s Peanuts. Today’s peanut brittle is melt-in-your-mouth, addictive and still a Christmas tradition.

Making a batch of Christmas peanut brittle

Peanut brittle is simple and easy to prepare with only a few ingredients. For this recipe, you can use Planter’s canned peanuts or a bag of raw peanuts parched in the oven in their shells. You will need one cup sugar, one cup peanuts, half cup dark Karo corn syrup, half cup water, one teaspoon of real vanilla extract, one teaspoon baking soda. Combine all ingredients except the baking soda in a pot or sauce pan and cook on medium heat for two minutes, stirring to prevent it from sticking. Add the baking soda and stir well. Pour onto a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper. Cool and then break into pieces. Place in a tin, or covered container. Dust with a sprinkle of corn starch to avoid sticky on brittle.

Daddy’s gift of Christmas pocket knives

From my early boyhood days my daddy would always buy me a pocket knife for Christmas each year and it became a tradition. After graduating from high school and later moving to Winston-Salem, he continued that tradition of giving a pocket knife each Christmas because he knew I used them at work. Every year, before Christmas he would go over the state line to Emporia, Virginia, to an old fashioned hardware and find just the right knife. As the years went by I wore out many of these knives. In 1989 he bought his last knife for me. It was a Case three blader. Dad died in 1990, and I still have that knife as a precious memory. Daddy’s gifts of useful gifts of pocket knives and a father’s love.

Searching for real spirit of Santa Claus

This is a real life event as told by a beloved neighbor named Marye who passed away in 2004. She told me of this special event in the years before she died. See if you believe in the spirit of Santa Claus after reading her story.

This event in Marye’s life occurred when she was raising four children on her own. It was Christmas Eve. She had finished her work and cashed her paycheck, bought groceries, paid her bills, and bought what Christmas she could for her kids as much as she could afford. Early on Christmas Eve, she explained to her children and hoped they understood — she told them she wished she could provide more toys then Santa was going to bring next morning. She told them that she loved them, and that she had done the very best she could, because she really desired better for her children.

At 11:30 p.m., there was a knock on the door. She wondered who it could be knocking at that time of night, and especially on Christmas Eve. She went to the door and peeped to see who it was. She was shocked to see a man in a Santa suit with several boxes and bags scattered around him. As she opened the door, the man did not introduce himself, but said to her, “I know you’re having it rough trying to raise four kids. I felt led to do something to make Christmas merry for all of them.” He shook her hand, wished them a Merry Christmas and walked off into the night.

Marye took all the bags and boxes inside. The boxes and bags contained the very items she had wanted to buy for her children. Who was this man? We believe as Marye said in telling of this event, which is one of my favorite Christmas stories, that she believed he was the spirit of Christmas, a guardian angel so to speak, that came to answer the need of a loving and caring mother with a serious need at Christmas. Ah, yes, Angels-God’s messengers. They come on to the scene, entertain us unawares, and without much fanfare, and then they disappear into the night, leaving us to ponder their visitation. Marye is now in the presence of these heavenly messengers and yes, now she knows the one who came as “Santa” more than 60 years ago Christmas Eve.

Christmas morning in Northampton County

We always spent Christmas Eve at home and Christmas morning after Santa came, we would spend Christmas Day at grandma’s house in Northampton County. Here are a few Christmas treasures we remember about Christmas morning in Northampton County. 1) Collard greens that were cooked in an iron wash-pot seasoned with country ham. 2) Red Ryder air rifles. 3) Cap pistols with rolls of caps that would be powerful enough to sting your arms. 4) Real candles lighting a room. 5) Pallets full of cousins filling the floor. 6) Presents under a fresh cut cedar tree. 7) Grandma watching grandkids open presents she had bought at the five and dime store. 8) Presents that were wrapped and had Christmas seals on them and no fancy bows or wraps but tissue wrap in the colors of red, green, white and blue. They were wrapped just as they came from the store with no boxes or bows. But oh how beautiful they all looked pilled under that red heart cedar. As we move through the journey of life, we discover it is the simple things we remember and treasure most of all.

Merry Christmas to all our readers

We wish all of our Garden Plot readers of The Mount Airy News, The Yadkin Ripple and The Stokes News a very wonderful and Merry Christmas filled with love, joy and peace. It is our pleasure to write the column each week and share it with all of you. We thank these newspapers for publishing the column each week plus all of you who read it and we send our best to you.

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