This week’s Sunday dinner featured — among many other things — one of my favorite highlights of the holiday season: Clementines!

If there’s someone out there with a hollowed-out soul or a neglected palette, let me explain these: Clementines are part of the mandarin orange family, legendarily the result of an unplanned cross-breeding, but more likely a variant that worked its way from Asia to the Mediterranean. Palm-sized, easy to peel, seedless and sweet, their popularity has grown explosively in recent years.

This is with good cause, because they are delicious and fantastic. They’re portable, they’re eminently edible, and they don’t require heavy-duty work to manage. They can be added to salads, they can be appetizers or desserts, they can be snacks or even cooked with meats. And best of all, they just plain smell like Christmas.

My father always used to haul home box after box of little, pocket-prime fruits throughout November, through the holidays and into New Year’s. They were a staple on our breakfast table all winter, and I can remember eating them during recess at school, or saving one for the afternoon and the walk home. The closest thing to candy that we could get before Christmas cookie season hit, they were sweet and way, way too easy to consume.

And, apparently, extremely good for you:

A clementine is enriched with vitamin C as well as essential sugars, fiber, calcium and vitamin A. They are very popular with health conscious people. They are so low in calories! A medium sized clementine will provide only 35-50 calories.

A clementine is very effective in water retention and detoxification. It also helps to fight nervous tension, insomnia and restlessness.

For about five dollars (Canadian, anyway), you can buy a little crate of clementines that will last a single person the best part of a week and a half — and that’s if you eat them voraciously. They come into season during the early winter, and last through until roughly Groundhog Day, making them almost synonymous with the holidays. Eat them long enough, in other words, and pretty soon you won’t be able to smell the peels without thinking of Christmas music and snow.

Clementines: The Perry Cuomo of fruit, but not as sleep-inducing. Go get yours today.