Some of the best memories of childhood, for anyone, are stirred by the smell of something baking ~ that warm, yummy sugar smell. Mama did not bake with a recipe and I remember seeing mom watching mama prepare something and all the while she wrote down what she saw. That got me thinking ... mama must have put "secret" ingredients in when nobody was looking and recipes we try just do not taste like when mama baked them.
Another smell that reminds me of Christmas is that of burning the cane before harvest - no it did not ruin the cane, rather it burned away a lot of the trash so that there was a cleaner harvest. After the burning they would cut the cane and put it in the trucks that took it to the refinery. You could see kids chasing after the trucks as they pulled off the plantation road onto the highway to the refinery ... going after the stalks of cane that fell off the trucks.
Back to my sweet memories ... they were still burning the crops during Christmas season ... ah, that smell. Oh, okay, back on track. Whenever we were visiting for Christmas we could be sure that some of the workers (probably because papa asked them) would come get us (girls), take us by the hand and walk with us by the cane crops. We would stop, they would sickle off stalks of cane, clean the bottom edges and hand us each our own stalk. They would take our hands again and we would walk with them while we sucked on the cane like lollipops - getting out all that sweet cane juice.
That got me thinking (yes, again and as we must have when we were little) ... we didn't chase no stinkin' trucks!
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