Christmas/Hanukkah can be a special time for fishermen, as their families give them presents of new fishing rods, reels, doodads, even angling trips in our Florida waters. Fishermen can also put up in their yards ornaments or blow-up figures telling passersby about their interest in the sport of angling. See the photo, for example, of a neighbor’s fishing Santa Claus in my neighborhood.
Relevant for this discussion of how to celebrate such holidays in Florida is a report issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which ranked all 50 states in terms of well-being. The nine different yardsticks were access to broadband, civic engagement, education, environment, health, housing, income, jobs, and safety. No mention of access to the best fishing spots in the country.
In that listing of the 50 states, the highest-ranking states, i.e. those places where life was “best,” were New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont, Iowa and North Dakota. Fishing did not seem to play a role in the overall feeling of well-being, but maybe it should have. Of course, we in Florida cannot compete with New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont, Iowa and North Dakota in terms of ice-fishing, but—really—would you rather be freezing on a lake in the upper Midwest, even in a heated fish house complete with a TV, or basking in the sun on a freshwater Florida lake or trolling for game fish several miles off Miami Beach wearing shorts and some sunscreen?
While Floridians usually have the same kinds of Christmas foods as their northern friends and relatives, we’ve also been known to adapt to what nature provides. For example, when Seminole Indians in 1874 were invited to celebrate what locals called “the white man’s Christmas” at Brickell Point near Miami, the 30 Indians who showed up grouped around a kettle of sof-kee, a mix of coontie starch and green corn, and tried out some of the “new” foods of the whites.
Both groups also ate large amounts of alligator tail, terrapin, and garfish, as well as sweet potatoes and bananas. The bounty from the waterways there seemed a natural way for the white settlers to adapt to new culinary ways with the Seminoles. They were following Southern customs of substituting seafood and turkey for the more traditional European dishes of goose and beef. For Christmas tree decorations, the Floridians substituted Spanish moss, seashells and sand dollars for tinsel and other ornaments.
Some Florida newspapers in late December delight in reminding readers just how cold it is in Minnesota or upstate New York, wherever visitors are liable to be from in a particular part of the Sunshine State. Somehow the mention of blizzards and ice storms and impassable roads make the hearts of Floridians that much warmer.
Kevin McCarthy, the award-winning author of “Christmas in Florida” (2000), can be reached at ceyhankevin@gmail.com.