After last issue’s polemic about the way we communicate one to another, I was really planning on talking more about the nature of discourse on-line.
I mean, the president of the USA referred to a female journalist as “piggy”. Try and spin that any way you want, that is peak punching down.
We’ve talked about this before: if you take shots at people who are equal in status (social, economic, political) or greater, that can be considered satire, or speaking truth to power, or punching up.
While I would still maintain that we should maintain a degree of civility in our discourse, it is also true that one of the jobs of journalism is to hold people in power accountable for their words and deeds.
But when you laugh at or punch down on people who are lesser in status (social, economic, political or other), you are not being funny, you’re bullying.
And there is this idea around the position of president (or prime minister, or pope, or mayor), where you take what people throw at you with grace and gravitas, treating them with kindness and respect.
Of course, no leader is perfect, and there have been many breaches in this assumed protocol. I’m thinking of Pierre Trudeau’s infamous “Shawinigan Handshake”, for one, or George W. Bush calling reporter Adam Clymer a “major league asshole,” or Ronald Reagan calling the entire press corps “sons of bitches. (Those last two were supposed to be off mic, though.)
Indeed, one could argue that there’s always been tension between politicians and the press, it’s just that Trump is now saying what’s supposed to be the quiet part out loud.
Related to that, I was also thinking about how the leadership of a country should and often does set the tone of the national conversation.
We see this in the states, with California Governor Gavin Newsom parroting back Trump’s rhetoric back at him.
Or in Canada, how Pierre Polievre’s “Canada is broken” rhetoric is now accepted as the gospel truth by many Conservative supporters, despite that fact that he is the one swinging the hammer. (Which, again, is not an argument in support of the Liberal Party, who are basically conservatives in red shirts, but a comment on the nature of public discourse.)
And honestly, it has ever been this way. So instead, I thought I’d talk about an issue nearer and dearer to me than these.
Which is this: why in the name of all that is good and right with this world do people keep trying to pass tangerines off as Christmas oranges?
Yes, I know, tangerines are a sub-species of mandarins.
But the type of orange that I grew up eating at Christmas is the satsuma, which is a Japanese variety of mandarin, which is ironic, as the name comes from the word for councillor in Chinese….
In Canada, eating oranges for Christmas goes back nearly 150 years, when Japanese immigrants on the west coast of Canada and the United States began receiving satsuma oranges from their families back home as gifts for the New Year.
And, because they were quite possibly one of the greatest foods mankind has ever tasted, the tradition of Japanese oranges in the winter began to spread to the non-Japanese population and eastward across the country.
In the early days, they would even paint boxcars orange so that people knew that the orange trains were arriving.
This tradition remained strong until after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour.
While there were satsuma trees in the US, the tradition took a hit.
When the war was over, one of the first Japanese products allowed back in North America was the Christmas orange, but they were rebranded mandarin oranges as opposed to Japanese oranges.
For years, these would arrive in distinct boxes, typically wrapped in green paper, but over the last few years, the purity of this tradition has slowly been eroding.
For one thing, the green paper wraps are now a thing of the past.
Indeed, many stores are opting for mandarins that come in mesh netting bags, like a common navel orange.
Worse, though, many of these oranges, while technically mandarins, are not my beloved satsumas, but clementines or worse, tangerines.
For instance, one of the most common brands to be found in the stores these days are not the classic Japanese satsuma mandarins, but Halos, which are typically clementines, grown in California.
Grown in California in itself isn’t a problem, unless you’re still signed up for the boycott America products from a few months ago. Indeed, they can (and do) grow satsumas in the states, but they’re not selling them here.
The issue is that Halos taste different. They feel different. They peel different. I used to love peeling elephants and spiders with the loose skin of a satsuma. But Halos? It’s just not the same.
In 2017, there was a shortage of satsumas shipped from Japan as a result of hot, dry weather.
In 2018, a boatload of Japanese oranges were refused at the Port of Vancouver due to quality control issues.
And with production slipping and costs rising, there was less than 50 tonnes of oranges shipped from Japan to all North America in 2023, and I fear that number will keep falling.
I’ve found one box of satsumas this year. Here’s hoping that they make a comeback and don’t go the way of other Christmas traditions that are lost to history, like wassailing, and the Lord of Misrule, and Christmas ghost stories (other than that one by Dickens) and the infamous tradition of hiding the pickle, nonono, get your mind out of the gutter, people used to hang a pickle ornament in the Christmas tree and the person who found it first would win a prize.
So this year, all I want for Christmas is a proper mandarin or two…
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
