Fruit at Christmas

We might generally be snow deprived here in Australia, and brought up to think a “proper” Christmas is a cold one, preferably with snow, and most of our cards have snow on them, and the decorations in shops all have sprayed-on snow, but one thing I love about our Christmas is that we have loads of gorgeous fresh fruit in season.

So, cherries, mangoes, peaches, grapes, watermelon, strawberries — berries of all sorts, actually — pineapples, bananas, apricots, figs, plums, passionfruit, and much more.

I always have my mum’s Chinese bowl filled with cherries on my Christmas table, and this year the cherries seem extra delicious.

I’ve been trying to lose weight, so in the lead-up to Christmas I’ve been having fruit for lunch. (All right I admit I sneak in a bit of chocolate occasionally but it’s mainly just fruit. ) Yesterday my lunch was a large mango and it was delicious, juicy and perfect. Today this is my lunch.

That’s a sliced-up yellow peach, by the way.  Watermelons are a favorite, not just because they’re juicy and delicious, but they remind me of church picnics when I was a little girl. A farmer used to arrive with a whole trailer-load of watermelons and honestly, it was as good as seeing Santa arrive (which he never did at the picnic.)

I think watermelons must have been harder to get back then, so for us kids they were a huge treat. We’d chomp into them with juice running down our chins and tuck the rinds into our mouths making huge green watermelon grins. And we’d spit the seeds at each other, and then when we’d had enough, we jumped into the river to wash and splash and swim.
Watermelons don’t seem to have seeds any more. Sad, I think.

With cherries we used to hang a pair of cherries over our ears to make “earrings.’

I bought some figs the other day, but they weren’t quite ready. I knew that but I just couldn’t resist them.  My own fig tree won’t start giving me figs until February and March, and you can bet I’ll be talking about them when it happens. The best way to eat figs is straight off the tree, when the base of the sun-warmed fruit has a drop of juice/nectar oozing out. Yum.