Having grown up in New England it was not infrequently that our family trips to Cape Cod would involve a visit to a cranberry bog. There is something wonderfully simple and plain about a cranberry and at the same time unusual. The simple turns of the cranberry leaf on the softly meandering vine is like footsteps along a garden path. It reminds me of the Shaker tune Tis a Gift to be Simple. The common name cranberry is a modification of the colonial name "crane berry," because the drooping flower looked like the neck and head of the sand crane, which was often seen eating the fruits.

I remember a visit to the Ocean Spray cranberry processor where an old timey New Englander explained the way they used to harvest cranberries with a large wooden 'cradle' in the old days. Even as a grammar school child, I was fascinated. It looked like a curved wooden fork, large enough to be held with two hands which would be swung through the ripe cranberries to 'comb' them off the bushes. Then flooding the bogs, they would scoop up the floating berries. I remember being thoroughly impressed when he said that they would bounce the berries down a washboard to sort the good berries from the bad. If it didn�t bounce it was culled from the batch. Cranberry bushes are cousins to blueberry bushes, from the same family, vaccinium. I once read that you can tell the difference between blue berries, huckle berries, dog berries and cranberries by counting the seeds on the inside!

One year, when visiting the bogs on Nantucket Island, I learned that one of the reasons why the cranberries are grown in bogs is that they can be flooded when frost is in the air, thus lengthening the otherwise short growing season in the northern states where cranberries are native. Nowadays harvesting is done by mechanically beating the berries off the bushes, then flooding the bogs, and the berries float through a sluice and are conveyed up into waiting trucks.

The air is always crisp at harvest time, winter is near, the very last warmth of autumn is giving up to the oncoming snowstorms. The light in New England is beginning to fade and become grey. Padding out into the bogs and munching those tart fresh berries with the secret little window pane cavities on the inside, is an experience that doesn�t get forgotten. Somehow, it slips back into mind when painting berries on pottery, the brush dabs the crimson, then a sparkle of white and a dot of black alongside the two tone green leaves that wind there way round the pottery.

The simplicity of the cranberry evokes memories of my great grandmother�s embroidery on a child�s smocked bodice. Or the simple strokes painted onto Colonial metal storage tins in the kitchens of old New England homes. And of course, no Thanksgiving dinner is complete without Cranberry sauce. With all of these things in mind, we designed our Cranberry Ceramic Pattern at the request of Ocean Spray's gift shop. Now it is available to everyone, and it is our hope that you can bring some of the simple beauty of this New England tradition into your home. Customers who have always longed for a special set of dinnerware find that our Cranberry dinnerware sets not only make Thanksgiving truly special, but that they are perfect for dinner every day. Our cranberry bakeware and kitchen ware adds just the right touch to your kitchen, and our cranberry lamps are particularly lovely. The potters at Emerson Creek Pottery make and paint each piece by hand here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Celebrate this New England tradition with us!

Priscilla Palmer
Emerson Creek Pottery