Christmas Peanuts

My grandfather Eugene Fletcher, like the man he was, reduced Christmas to its essence. Being a humble man didn’t mean to reduce Christmas to its essence, but he did it anyway. At Christmas our grandfather didn’t buy presents, no greeting cards, no peppermint candy. What he did buy was a barrel of peanuts, maybe only a half-barrel, but still a lot of peanuts. As might be guessed, peanuts don’t cost much, hence the phrase “just peanuts,” the only thing less valuable than peanuts apparently was the dirt itself.

Peanuts don’t grow in Wisconsin. Never mind that’s not quite true, you can grow peanuts, but it takes effort, about the same as growing marijuana in Wisconsin; grow lights in the cellar sort of thing. Not the same kind of regard taken to growing potatoes in Wisconsin or oats. Surprising the amount of stuff that needs an effort to grow in Wisconsin, corn, soybeans, green beans, plant any of these with the same inattention given potatoes and you won’t get a crop. The amazing thing is all these sorta fragile crops do grow and grow pretty well in Wisconsin. Genetics has something to do with this but the other part is effort, not just throwing the seed at the ground the moment it goes limp in the spring.

Peanuts as mentioned do grow in Wisconsin, just not very good. Their growing season is about 140 days, a full 40 days beyond a standard Wisconsin dose. Not to mention the years when standard doesn’t happen. The map of the world so routinely divided up into latitudes, could be just as well measured by fruits and vegetables. Granny Smith apples is about latitude 35° north. Tomatoes attach at about 38° latitude, soybeans 40°, sweet corn peaks at 45°, peanuts 30°, they can grow peanuts in Georgia.

Every Christmas our grandfather bought a barrel of Georgia peanuts, and on Christmas day gave his grandchildren each a sackfull, a big paper sack. This the extent of his Christmas tom-foolery, leaving it to Uncle Curtis to ruin our souls with BB guns, jackknives and redhots, a gumball convective that burned a hole through your cheek from the inside out, at least that was the sensation. The sack of peanuts was pretty much a letdown but Uncle Curtis came through with firecrackers, bottle rockets, invisible ink and x-ray glasses. A sack of peanuts, what sort of Christmas is that? Plain roasted peanuts, not even salted in the shell peanuts when there was hard candy to be had, lemon drops, peppermint sticks, chocolate reindeer, licorice ropes, Cracker Jack…and our grandpa Fletcher gave us peanuts.

What we had failed to allow was the latitude of our fate, being as farmkids, that any attempt to detoxify our winter chores by taking along those Christmas treats was doomed to failure. The lemon drops, the cinnamon hots, the hard candy shaped like tiny pillows, this cherished supply we stashed in our pockets so to raise the temper of our evening chores. Candy that soon resembled small furry animals that were with some difficulty extracted from our pockets. Depending on what was in the pocket previous determined the taste of the candy. Oil rags, nuts and bolts, Golden Eye BBs, firecrackers, pipe dope, bag balm…I do know why there isn’t a big call for hard candy tasting of Doctor Zeimer’s sulphanated bag balm. To add that hard candy exposed to body heat tends to solidify into a single unextractable mass, so unextractable we had to take our pants off and smack the pocket area with a hammer to gain access to the candy. Not the kind of situation you want to get caught doing.

Our grandfather Eugene Fletcher understood the solution was peanuts, but this detail took awhile for us. Getting caught red-handed with your pants off hammering at the very real rock candy was such a transition. For a week, two weeks, three weeks after Christmas we loaded our pockets with peanuts. I think I did mention it was a big bag of peanuts? Every chore, nice weather or foul, snow, sleet of blinding blizzard we had our peanuts. Eventually we learned the superlative trick of putting a whole peanut in our mouth and shucking it unaided, then the luxury of spitting out the shells. I don’t know what is so gratifying about spitting peanut shells but it is.

Eventually we emptied those peanut bags and Christmas was over. But the mood of Christmas had lingered on for three weeks because of those peanuts. I don’t know if this was our grandfather’s point or whether he just had a thing for peanuts. He wasn’t the kind of man to say either way, just as I never knew whether he voted Democrat or Republican, that my grandfather, Eugene Fletcher, second place east of Maynard’s Corner, the stone barn, white house, wood-fired stove.