In Defense of Fruitcake

At some point or another, every Christmas celebrant in America has to draw lines in the sand over the following doctrinal issues:

When is it acceptable to begin listening to Christmas music?
What are your thoughts on front yard inflatables?
Will you shop on Black Friday or boycott it and buy all the crap a couple weeks later?
To what lengths will you go to ensure that your tenth grader still believes in Santa?
What will be your game plan regarding the song “Christmas Shoes”?
How much fruitcake will you consume?

The first five questions have been known to tear families and friends asunder during this glorious time of year. But the one that unites enemies? Fruitcake.

Johnny Carson first captured the nation’s consciousness with a joke on the Tonight Show: “The worst gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.” The city of Manitou Springs, Colorado, hosts the National Fruitcake Toss every January, and several other cities have followed suit.

According to the site The Great Fruitcake Recycling Project, “There is no Christmas gift more vilified, more dreaded, and more prolific than the Fruitcake.”

I beg to differ.

You can trash everything: the tree, the presents, the music. All of Whoville can be stripped of its holiday accoutrements. But for me, as long as there is fruitcake to sink my teeth into (okay, and mention of baby Jesus), Christmas is still on.

I grew up with the smell of a dozen pounds of fruit soaking in brandy every January. My mother, following an old English wedding cake recipe passed to her through her mother, who received the recipe from a British neighbor, would make the individually wrapped cupcakes eleven months in advance and store them in airtight metal tins, allowing the brandy to work its way into every cell of the chopped cherries, dates, raisins, and vivid candied fruit.

On Thanksgiving, my mother would pull strips of packing tape off the seals, and a wallop of spiced, brandied fruit would sock me full in the face. (Fruitcake can be aged indefinitely, by the way, which explains why it made for a popular wedding cake among those smart Brits: years of anniversary treats.)

The first bite switched on Christmas like an electric current in my brain. Over the coming weeks, skipping and pigtailed, I would deliver baskets of the cakes to our neighbors’ sunny California porches.

Making fruitcake, however, is not a casual endeavor. While the results are delicious, the process is painful. I heard my mother complain about the prices of the ingredients and then the arduous work itself. Stirring the concrete-thick batter in her giant fruitcake cauldron, curly red hair flying, she would curse under her breath, sometimes over it, breaking a wooden spoon or two and nursing blisters the next day.

My mother, who still climbs the roof to oil her weathervane at age seventy-eight, probably has a good ten years of fruitcake-making left in her. But I grew up with the uneasy expectation that I, not my older sister, would continue the tradition, and it’s high time I began my apprenticeship.

So this season, I took on the fruitcake challenge.

First, I had to procure the ingredients without exhausting our gift budget. I decided to cut the recipe by half. And since I’d heard horror stories about the scarcity of affordable, candied fruit, I ordered a couple bags online at eight dollars per pound. Then it was off to the store for raisins, dates, prunes, walnuts, and glace cherries for the top.

I called my mom about the brandy. Does the quality matter?

“Get the cheapest you can find, ” she said. “And you can put the leftovers in your coffee.”

Noted.

The first night of the three-day process, I was scheduled to combine the fruit and let it soak in brandy till morning. But just a couple hours before, I received a call from my sister: she was in the hospital in California with heart problems, having arrived with all the symptoms of a looming heart attack.

While texting my sister throughout the evening, I chopped prunes and dates. I tried not to cry. Then I had to call my mom, whose emotions I was trying to avoid in the midst of this news, to ask her when to add the sugar.

“With the fruit and butter, before you bring it to a boil.”

“Okay,” I said. Then, “How worried are you about Heidi?”

“She’ll be okay,” my mom said. “God will take care of her.”

It was a surprisingly simple calm response, but what I needed to hear as I watched the rainbow of fruit begin its slow simmer. In the middle of the night, my sister texted me several scripture passages she had read as she lay in her hospital bed. One of them, from Jeremiah, describes one who trusts in the Lord like a tree that “has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

Fruit. Of course. God enjoys amusing those with ridiculous senses of humor.

I woke to the rich fragrance of my California childhood in my Illinois kitchen. When I added a seeming Everest of flour and nuts and began to stir, the hardest part of the process, I thought of Jeremiah. If my sister could trust with all manner of procedures and possibilities in front of her, then I could at least try to trust along with her.

It didn’t take long for my hands to ache, for me to want to give up. Cookies are so much easier—and more socially acceptable, for that matter.  But I stirred, scraped, and folded, just once or twice actually reaching the bottom of the pan.

“Get this,” my sister texted. “Carolers are singing in the hospital hallway about fruitcake. Using it as a doorstop or something.”

I texted her a selfie of me with the batter, an open-mouthed, sarcastic smile. All day the fruitcakes baked at gentle one-hour intervals at 250 degrees. My house slowly filled with the aroma of home, of my family two thousand miles away.

On day three, when the cakes were completely cool, I wrapped them in Saran Wrap and sealed them tightly in a plastic storage box.

Lord, bring us Christmas 2015, I prayed over them. Bring us joy and peace no matter what drought or flood the year may bring.

The best gift is fruitcake. And yes, Johnny, there is only one in the entire world.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky (Cascade Poiema Series), A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” was recently released by T.S. Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Books & Culture, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, and the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. She tutors high school students and edits for Every Day Poems and Relief.