Celebrating

Thinking back over her memories of Christmas, Maya Angelou recalls the aroma in her family’s store in Stamps, Ark.

“My grandmother would take an orange and almost parboil it … and she would stick cloves into the peel and wrap it up,” Angelou says.

Then a week before Christmas, the oranges would be unwrapped and “the whole store, and of course, the house which was around the store, everything, would just smell of oranges and cloves.”

Stirred by the memory, Angelou almost sniffs the air as she decides she may make some of those oranges herself this year.

She’s also serving up another holiday treat this season, hosting the Hallmark Channel’s “Celebrate! Christmas with Maya Angelou,” replete with not only good food but also music, laughter, memories and a solid dose of Angelou’s wisdom and philosophy.

Back in the spring, when rhododendrons and azaleas were in bloom around her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., the Hallmark production team “dressed my house the way it would be dressed for Christmas, with two huge Christmas trees, and my family and friends came from around in a Christmas mood,” she says.

Angelou’s immediate relatives – including her son, Guy Johnson, and great grandchildren, Caylin and Brandon – were on hand. So were members of what she calls her “extended family,” including singer-songwriters Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, whose voices and musical skills add to and accompany the impromptu chorus of Christmas songs and carols sung during the course of the party.

They echo each other in saying Angelou is “all about celebrating,” so there was no difficulty at all in creating Christmas spirit out of season.

“It’s her spirit. You just gravitate to her. That’s why I call her my angel,” beams Ashford.

Born Marguerite Johnson, Angelou has written 13 books, including the autobiographical best seller “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and the cookbook “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table.”

She has acted on Broadway and in the TV miniseries “Roots” and soon will be seen playing “I think myself … sort of one of the older, wise women” in the movie comedy “Madea’s Family Reunion.”

She has won three spoken-word Grammys and teaches humanities at Wake Forest University.

Now 77, Angelou suffers from knee problems and has to move cautiously. Yet her deep, distinctive voice is as fully ripe as when she memorably delivered her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration in 1993.

Her new poem, “Amazing Peace,” which she read Dec. 1 at the lighting of the National Christmas tree in Washington, speaks of how celebrating Christmas transcends boundaries of all faiths.

“I celebrate the birth of forgiveness, the birth of Jesus Christ into all the great religions of the world. … The idea of peace, the idea of forgiveness is yearned for. We hunger after it,” she explains.

Like many, Angelou would prefer holiday seasons to be less commercial.

“It does worry me,” she says. “I think we are wasting something, things our children will never know about – some of the delicious aspects of all the holidays, whether Christmas, or Seder, or Tet, or Ramadan … the deliciousness of the family getting together and laughing a lot, and teasing, and saying, ‘You remember last year when. …’ “