Dreading the Holiday bustle? Shackled to your computer, clicking around for the perfect gifts? You haven’t even started? Well, fret no more! Here at Goodness Greeness, we have the perfect one-stop-shopping gift that is sure to strike the fancy of any hard-to-please member on your Holiday list. From California and Florida come those precious organic orbs of orange whose skin tears apart with a distinct aromatic spray and whose flesh drips with sweet sunshine. Packed with powerful antioxidant support, they are historically the perfect holiday gift.
Or at least they once were an illustrious opulence of royalty. When oranges first reached Europe, they were so rare that they became a symbol of prestige to be offered as luxury gifts. The Medici family adopted five oranges to their coat of arms. Charles VIII of France, returning from a visit to Italy in 1494, brought back with him gardeners and architects who could create for him an “orangerie”, a practice that during the next two centuries escalated competition between monarchs for the most magnificent orange room. Versailles won with its 1200-foot long building built in the shape of a “C”. With its season peaking in winter, the orange became a coveted Christmas gift up into the early 20th century.
Oranges originate from adjoining areas of China, Myanmar, and northeastern India. That’s why its name started out in Sanskrit, “naranga”. As the fruit and tree moved west through Persia and then to Europe through Spain and Italy, its name changed from Persian narang and Arabic naranj to Old Italian melarancio or “fruit of orange tree” to Old French pume orenge. So it was Middle English text in 1380 that noted the “orenge”.
En route with Spanish missionaries and explorers, oranges reached California and Florida, now the largest producers of oranges alongside Brazil. When the Moors brought the fruit to Spain and Portugal, they introduced it as a powerful component of religious services and medicines. This hallowed attention on the orange carried it far to the Americas, even with Christopher Columbus to the West Indies.
Perhaps not establishing its religious importance but remarkable nonetheless, a few qualities of the orange are peculiar. Its evergreen tree can simultaneously produce fragrant leaves, flowers, and fruit, attributing to it associations of fertility. Also special to note, when temperatures aren’t cool enough, oranges remain green, even when mature. It is cool temperatures that help destroy green chlorophyll pigments in the skin so that underlying yellow carotenoids can show through. And finally, many important antioxidant and cholesterol-lowering agents are not only found in the fruit but also in its peel, making organic orange zest an easy but vital flavor addition.
So there you have it, a plentiful heritage that proves the orange’s worth among the ranks of gift giving—or unadorned wintertime snacking while you shop.
Even though it relates a bizarre method of dying hair “real orange”, the Flaming Lips song belts a catchy way to say tangerine (“She uses taaaaaaaangerines…”). The name of the fruit was adopted from a city. Native to Southeast Asia, tangerines were first shipped to Europe from a port in Tangier, Morocco in 1841. They are a cross between mandarins and the bitter orange, which is why their sweet but tangy flesh peels easily from its skin. They are smaller in size than the orange and have a slightly flattened shape, but the orange packed inside is real. Song worthy. 