Christmas is not only a time for rejoicing and celebration, but also a time of gratitude for what we have. In times such as these, in which all of us have been affected by the circumstances related to COVID-19, this is all the more important. It’s for this reason I would like to point out that it’s not only Christmas today, but every day. What do I mean by this? To answer this question, I’ll provide a lesson from my mother.
My mother was born in a town called Carini, in the Province of Palermo, Sicily. She was born and grew up in a home with no car, no television, and no air conditioning. After she migrated to the United States in 1971, see never thought of returning to her hometown, and always reminded us how wonderful life in America is.
It was 30 years today that she imparted on me a lesson, one that I will never forget and that I only fully appreciate now. It was an important lesson of economic development and the blessings of a free society that she taught me, even though my mom never made it to high school. She would reflect on her own childhood, telling us that the smell of oranges would remind her of Christmas.
What’s baffling about this story is that, even before my mom was born and to the present day, Sicily remains the largest producer of oranges in Italy, and a major producer of oranges and other citrus fruits worldwide. You’d think, in spite of the poverty within which she was raised, she would enjoy oranges on a more regular basis. Yet, today, most us enjoy (or can enjoy at little cost) and take for granted what had been a luxury that was consumed during Christmas, even amongst those residing in a part of the world where they were grown in relative abundance.
My intention here is neither to secularize nor undermine how special and joyous the Christmas season is. Rather, it is to express gratitude and place in perspective what the beneficial consequences of economic development are, and not to take for granted how new in the history of humankind our way of life is, even during times as hard as this. The point here is that one of the fruits of economic development, and the institutional preconditions that facilitate it, namely private property and freedom of contract under the rule of law, not only provide the framework to practice religious freedom, but also allows the masses of the population to get just not a smell, but a taste of Christmas every day.
Rosolino Candela is a Senior Fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and Associate Director of Academic and Student Programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University
READER COMMENTS
Mark Brady
Dec 25 2020 at 6:23pm
That’s an interesting story about your mom. Is this an example of “shipping the good apples out”? If so, it looks like it’s a consequence of the development of citrus agriculture in Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about by foreign demand for lemons to combat scurvy. This is another story of private property and market forces at work, but in this case they illustrate perhaps a less than benign outcome. It is estimated that in 1908 an Italian laborer would earn 1.5 lire to harvest almost 5,000 lemons per day. That’s almost 85 lire of lemons. But what if the right to land had not derived from hereditary rights but belonged to the laborers themselves?
“Origins of the Sicilian Mafia,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 77, no. 4 (December 2017): 1083-1115.
MarkW
Dec 26 2020 at 9:49am
She would reflect on her own childhood, telling us that the smell of oranges would remind her of Christmas.
Me too. Oddly enough, oranges in Christmas stockings are an American tradition — dating from a time when they were a rare winter luxury. By the time I was a little kid (about when your mother came to the U.S.) it didn’t really make sense (after they came out of the stockings the oranges just went into the kitchen), but the tradition carried on. The guy across the street who dressed up as Santa Claus for the neighborhood kids also handed out what he called ‘south pole oranges’ on Christmas Eve). He was a cinematographer who worked on commercials and a few Hollywood movies, so his suit and makeup were amazing, and we kids had no idea who he actually was until somebody spotted Santa getting into a particular station wagon.
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