Christmas morning should smell like tangerines. That is one of the aromas and flavors whose presence I require to make the holiday complete.
I suspect that other people feel that way about other holidays. A friend who celebrates Hanukkah, for instance, says for him the holiday has to smell like potato pancakes. While the Kwanzaa table is decorated with fruits and vegetables, particularly those important in African-American history -- bananas, plantains, peanuts, corn, yams and rice -- the primary aroma of the celebration, I am told, is incense which is burned during the feast.
I got hooked on the aroma of tangerines as a boy. Every Christmas, as my brothers and I raced around the tree tearing open presents, someone would peel a few tangerines, filling the happy room with a heady aroma. To this day, when I catch a whiff of the sweet perfume of tangerine peels, it gives me a rush. For a minute or two, an increasingly cynical adult experiences a feeling that borders on childlike wonder.
I also require nuts, walnuts and peanuts, at Christmastime. The walnuts should be stuffed in the stockings, just below the tangerines. When I was a kid, walnuts appeared only on Christmas morning and were considered the nuts of a great occasion. Peanuts appeared at the Knights of Columbus party. For me Christmas peanuts meant a taste of freedom. Like most kids, I was under a lot of pressure in the days leading up to Christmas. I thought my arithmetic teacher would never stop assigning extra homework. I thought Christmas would never come. But experience had taught me that if I somehow lasted until the Knights of Columbus Christmas party, life would get better.
The Knights of Columbus is a fraternal organization for Catholic men. My dad was a Knight. On a December Sunday the Knights of St. Joseph, Mo., would open their clubhouse for a Christmas party for their kids. The Knights' clubhouse was a remarkable turn-of-the century structure. It had winding staircases, wood-paneled rooms and a second-floor balcony. For me and the horde of other Knights of Columbus offspring who showed up at the party, the hall was a pleasure palace.
There were free Pepsis served at the bar, a pool table in the basement, and everywhere you looked there were peanuts. Mounds of peanuts sat on every table. You could stuff them in your pockets. You could take them home. You could eat as many as you wanted. I ate and ate and ate. When I tasted those peanuts, holiday pressure lifted. I knew that somehow things were going to be OK. I knew that I was only a mere arithmetic class or two away from Christmas vacation, from liberation.
Now when I smell peanuts roasting at the Konstant's stand in Baltimore's Lexington Market, I still get the feeling that better days are just around the corner.
I sniff and sip yeasty champagne on Christmas morning. I got the idea of drinking champagne on Christmas morning a few years ago from a friend. After hearing how the adults in her family happily sipped champagne as they opened presents, I tried the practice out at our house. I liked it.
The up side of sipping champagne on Christmas morning is the warm feeling you get as presents are exchanged. The down side is that about an hour after you finish the champagne, you want to take a long winter's nap.
My only requirement for Christmas dinner is that it be aromatic. Sometimes the house fills with odors of roast turkey. Every once in a while Christmas dinner smells like lamb. One year, when I tried to start a fire in a defunct dining room fireplace, Christmas smelled like smoke.
After the big meal has been completed and the dishes washed, the aromas die down. That is when the dishwasher might reward himself for a job well-done by helping himself to a second helping of chocolate mousse, or a piece of our family-made fruitcake.
Finally there is the pastrami sandwich. I have to have one during the Christmas season. It is a holiday practice that got started 14 years ago, when our first son was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore. After spending the day at the hospital I headed home. I was hungry but it was Christmas and most eateries were closed.
Attman's Delicatessen on East Lombard Street was open. When I told the woman working behind the counter that my wife had just presented me with a son, the woman congratulated me. "Mazel tov," she said, and made me a hot pastrami sandwich.
I enjoy a pastrami sandwich any time of the year. But it tastes especially good to me around Christmas.