Wednesday, December 06, 2006
THE FRUITCAKE
Brendalove@gmail.com
I can't believe I'm heading into my third Christmas of blogging but I've never blogged about The Fruitcake. I have a fruitcake that looks exactly like one of the smaller ones above. Just exactly like it.
Yep. Except its like, 15 years old.
So why do I have a 15 year old fruitcake? Its very hard to explain. I don't remember who gave us The Fruitcake. When The Fruitcake first entered the household, I put it out with the milk and cookies for Santa Claus. I didn't take it out of its wrapper, I just sat it there.
Well, Santa doesn't eat fruitcake either.
I was not the one who put the thing in the freezer after Christmas. It was my darling ex-husband who did that, for reasons unknown. probably because there was going to be no trash service for a few days. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that yes, last Christmas' fruitcake was in the freezer, but I wasn't sufficiently moved to actally take action about it.
If I remember correctly, the next Christmas I had forgotten cookies for Santa. When you have a two-year-old child staring at you about to cry, you think fast. "Oh wait, there's FRUITCAKE in the freezer!" "Mommy, does Santa like fwootcake?" "Honey, Santa can't get enough fruitcake!" So out came the fruitcake to the table, still wrapped, next to the milk.
The next morning, I didn't want my child thinking Santa didn't like his fruitcake, so I threw it back into the freezer to hide it. And thus a sacred tradition was born.
The Fruitcake comes out on Christmas Eve. It thaws. It goes back in the freezer on Christmas Day. Also, there have been several (quite a few, actually) hurricanes, ice storms and other special occasions when The Fruitcake has been thawed. When Hurricane Fran hit, I actually tucked it into the bottom of our cooler, but as the town ran out of ice, it thawed. I put it in a distant corner of the house.....just in case it got to stinking............but it never stank. Its probably preserved in a hard fruity casing, kind of like a Neanderthal ant preserved in amber.
Now Stew wants me to send it to him so he can give a 15 year old fruitcake to his neighbor as a joke. NO WAY! Its taken me 15 years to get it to this point. This is a seasoned fruitcake, thawed and frozen to perfection. If I could put it under my microscope, I would probably observe several layers of microbes, frozen stiff, only to rise again at the next thaw, more powerful than ever before. You know, Penicillin was discovered under strange kitchen circumstances, I'm liable to have the cure for cancer growing in my freezer.
A joke, indeed. I'm donating that baby to Science when I pass on.
Posted by brendalove@gmail.com @ 9:00 AM
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