'tis the Mango Season. Time to Make Merry

I adore a mango. I've just purchased a case on special at the supermarket.

They're good for you but don't tell the kids that.

For fun and pleasure, a mango ranks with Christmas. How fortunate these great seasons coincide in our part of the world. The innocuous mango has a colourful "history". But we'll talk more about this in a moment.

Same as Christmas, mangos are fun and social. For starters, they make people laugh when at lunchbreak I slop it's heavenly contents down the front of my crisp white Kalvin Klein shirt and Trent Nathan tie. It's even more laughable when I'm obliged to attend a meeting later in the day wearing said stained shirt and tie in an office that thrives on gossip and politics.

When invited to someone's home for dinner around Christmas time, a gift of a box of mangos does the trick. It solves the problem of what to give. A nice safe gift for someone you don't know. They'll remember your magnificent offering for festive seasons to come. "Remember when Foss brought those mangos?" Bring wine and they forget you the next day.

They're good for dinner conversation. Nothing breaks an awkward silence on a first date more perfectly - or subtly introduces the topic of mangos to a lemon-loving colleague better than a mango joke:

Two Jamaican men were throwing stones at a mango tree, trying to hit down a large mango right at the top, when one said to the other: "All de stone we stone, suppose de mango no ripe?" "True," said his friend, "Check it out mon." The first man then climbed the tree, went all the way to the top where the limbs were dangerously thin, felt the mango and came back down. "It ripe," he said to his friend. "We naa fling stone fi nutten." Back down the tree he came and then they began to stone the mango tree again.

Q: What is a feminist's favourite non-phallic fruit?

A: Mango

Q: How many mango farmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: None. Mangos are cultivated by caterpillars and transported to market on the backs of of lice thus negating the necessity of having a farmer

Knock, knock

Who's there?

A mango

A mango who?

Have you always been able to speak to talking mangos with the ability to knock on doors or is this a new development in your mania?

Q: What do you call a woman with two mangos on her head

A: It's my friend Gertrude. She's mentally disabled and I'll thank you not to make fun of her

The mango attraction is not only enhanced by the eating. It's juicy gossip rating matches that of Britney Spears.

For centuries the people of, at first the Dark Ages, and then the Getting Brighter Ages, had engorged themselves on all the fruits known to man - the plum, the banana, the orange, the tortoise, the melon, the coconut, the apple, and the potato to name but a few - and apathy had begun to set in. Civilisation had become complacent with regards to healthy eating and lusted after the forbidden fruits of cigarettes, cornish pasties and the Aussie meat pie.

Sicknesses and diseases long-considered extinct or, at worst, confined to France such as rickets, scurvy, and Republicanism were sweeping through populations the world over. Something had to be done and someone had to do the something that had to be done before nobody did nothing about the something.

Sadly, nobody did until the latter half of the nineteenth century when popular scientist Isabella di Mango (Italian discoverer of aerobics and popular because of her insistence in performing it nude) accidentally created the world's first mango while trying to perfect the rear body reach near a bowl of overripe peaches and a pear with an inferiority complex.

One quick call to Malaysia to arrange growing rights and royalties, a naked aerobicist dripping in a mango juice advertising campaign, and the mango took the world by storm. As Isabella aged, her popularity, like her often-exposed breasts, sagged, and with it went the soar away success of the new fruit. But like General Douglas MacArthur, it returned to conquer us all

Have a merry mango Christmas