My Love/Hate Relationship with Orange

What do you think of when you hear the word Orange? Food, like oranges and pumpkins? Colors, ranging anywhere from palest peaches to deep tomato? Holidays, like Halloween or Thanksgiving? Or maybe places like New Jersey or Florida and California? As usual, something insignificant happened that led me down this path of thinking. Today, it was Starbucks. I was enjoying a pumpkin scone this morning and started thinking about pumpkins. I won’t go through the scary stream of consciousness that took off from there, but I will strive to put the highlights into some sort of coherent order for you.

Food
Ever try to sit and think about what kind of orange food you might consume on a regular basis? It might be a bit easier for the vegetarians out there, but being a meat-eater, I don’t know that I pay that much attention aside from carrots. Besides, all the publicity seems to go to the green vegetables. Where would we be without oranges and other citrus foods? Riddled with scurvy, no doubt.

So, orange food that I can stomach would lean more toward the fruit side as opposed to the vegetable side of things. Oranges, peaches, nectarines and mangos. Not real high on my list of orange foods is pumpkin and yams. I can eat pumpkin as an ingredient in pastry like pumpkin bread or scones, but not as pumpkin pie. Although I do make an attempt each Thanksgiving to try to hated orange foods. I’m sorry, but yams, candied or otherwise are just gross.

Color
Of all the bright colors I surround myself with, the glaring omission in my rainbow is orange. I never really cared for the color. It makes my skin look a little on the green side, and why would I want that? I tried giving peach a shot, especially in the 80’s. And frosted peach, at that. It was awful. My other aversion to orange comes from my hair and “when highlights go wrong” episodes. One wrong step and I have orange hair, which is just no way to live. It makes me feel like a clown. Yeah, and clowns are scary. And clowns wear orange. Ergo, orange is scary. Must stay away from orange. And clowns. (Another good reason to learn how to make my own balloon animals.) Now, just for entertainment value, I am also including a link to a website to let you all know what orange says about you if it shows up in your aura. Oh, and here is a picture of me dressed as a clown. Note the orange hair. If this doesn’t turn you off to clowns, I don’t know what will.

Fear and Candy Corn
Other things not doing wonders for the image of orange: Halloween and Stanley Kubrick. Why is orange associated to Halloween? Is it the pumpkins? Is it supposed to represent the moon? I’m sure the answer is out there somewhere. One good thing about orange and Halloween is candy corn. Yummy. I like circus peanuts too, which I know are gross. Plus that whole circus/clown connection is there.

One movie that I simply cannot watch is A Clockwork Orange. I can’t do it. Even understanding what it is about and being a psychology major and all that crap couldn’t convince me to sit through it. (So I guess in terms of aversion therapy, I say Bravo!) Maybe I was too young at the time, but I have no desire to see if I could sit through it now either. It also makes me a little hesitant to watch any movies with Malcolm McDowell.

Nicknames
Well, let’s just end this thing on a positive note for the weekend, shall we? A couple of other orange related items to share with you deal with nicknames. My Dad still calls me “pumpkin” to this day and my grandma used to call me “peachy”, so there you go. As an added bonus, here is a picture of me incorporating so much of my orange discussion. It represents the color, a holiday, a food, one of my nicknames and the picture was even taken by my grandma. I think the only thing missing is Malcolm McDowell dressed as a clown and eating circus peanuts.