Kids today aren’t likely to be quite as excited by holiday fruit as Pete Napolitano was as a child.

Fifty years ago, it was Napolitano family tradition to stuff Christmas stocking with citrus wrapped in brightly colored foil.

“It was Italian tradition,” says Napolitano, also known as Produce Pete on his weekly New York area television segment about what to buy at the market. “If I did that to my grandkids they’d look at me and say ’Poppy, we want a Game Boy.’ It would be like putting coal in their stocking.”

Fruit may not cut it any more as an acceptable stocking stuffer, but the tiny, vibrant globes called clementines are a growing part of the winter food season.

Sometimes called “Christmas oranges” because they peak in supermarkets between Thanksgiving and early January, these small, slightly flat mandarins generally are sold in 5-pound boxes.

Thin-skinned, easy to peel and (most pleasantly) seedless, intensely sweet clementines stand out as snacking fruit, especially for children.

Americans are expected to eat more than 180,000 tons of clementines this year, according to U.S. government and industry figures, most of them from Spain and California.

Domestic growers have only recently plunged into the more than $69 million industry. Clementines first came to the United States in 1909 from Algeria and were grown sporadically in Florida and California, says Tracy Kahn, curator of the Citrus Variety Collection at the University of California, Riverside.

But Americans first developed a real taste for them in 1997, industry executives said, when a crop-crushing freeze in Florida forced buyers to import tons of citrus, including clementines.

“This has been an explosion within the last five to seven years out of California,” says Scott Owens, vice president of sales and marketing for Delano, Calif.-based Paramount Citrus, which along with partner Sun Pacific grows 74 percent of all U. S. clementines.

Paramount harvested its first trees in 2004, and this season Owens says the American industry is expected to produce 135,000 tons of clementines. Their popularity has grown so fast — and so suddenly — that 2007 marks the first year the government has tracked them separately from other citrus.

“There are a lot of people out there planting them,” he says. “It’s a segment of the citrus industry that’s really growing now. And the industry overall is flat. So it’s nice to have something new and fresh.”

Sometimes said to have been an accidental hybrid discovered by French missionary Father Clement Rodier in the garden of his orphanage in Algeria, clementines are generally considered by scientists to be a type of Chinese mandarin, says Khan. There are dozens of varieties, she says, all very similar.

The one grown most often in the United States is the clemnule. Clementines also are naturally seedless as long as they remain isolated from other types of trees and are not cross pollinated.

Clementine season runs from late October through April. But Napolitano says stick to the window between Thanksgiving and early January for the best quality. Select fruit that is shiny and free of spots, smells fragrant and feels heavy in the hand.

“If it feels like a feather, it’s going to taste like a feather,” he says. “You’re looking for the juice in there.” Store them in a cool place for up to two weeks.

Organic clementines are sometimes available. Even though the skin isn’t consumed, conventional clementines will be sprayed from blossom to harvest.

, Napolitano says, something for organics devotees to consider.