What I’m Blogging

Lately there have been a deluge of articles about political correctness and the debate about how much Christ should be in Christmas during this Holiday season. Well this post is is well in that vein of thought, but on a slightly narrower field. I propose that we give Christ a break and take him out of Christmas Cake. It could become a Holiday Cake, and then all denominations and faiths could equally share in the Curse joy that is cake encrusted dried fruit during their December celebrations.

…Let it be as universal, as it is universally despised!…

Christmas Cake, historians tell us, arrived in Europe in the 13th century as the bad idea to suspend newly imported dried fruit in a mixture of early edible cement, which was then passed around from house to house as a form of torture. It is undocumented, but widely believed (at least by me) that Christmas Cake was a chief weapon of the Spanish Inquisition. Didn’t expect that did you? Through the ages Christmas Cake has been reviled. Which Cake did you think Marie Antoinette suggested the citizens of Paris eat? You guessed it - Christmas Cake! Can you blame them for chopping off her head? I think not.

You also can’t get rid of the darned things. You give them away, and they keep coming back. They never decay, they just get older. As Russell Baker said, “Fruitcake is Forever”.

“Thirty-four years ago, I inherited the family fruitcake. Fruitcake is the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom. It had been in my grandmother’s possession since 1880, and she passed it to a niece in 1933. Surprisingly, the niece, who had always seemed to detest me, left it to me in her will….I would have renounced my inheritance except for the sentiment of the thing, for the family fruitcake was the symbol of our family’s roots. When my grandmother inherited it, it was already 86 years old, having been baked by her great-grandfather in 1794 as a Christmas gift for President George Washington. Washington, with his high-flown view of ethical standards for Government workers, sent it back with thanks, explaining that he thought it unseemly for Presidents to accept gifts weighing more than 80 pounds, even though they were only eight inches in diameter…There is no doubt…about the fruitcake’s great age. Sawing into it six Christmasses ago, I came across a fragment of a 1794 newspaper with an account of the lynching of a real-estate speculator in New York City.”

—”Fruitcake is Forever,” Russell Baker, New York Times, December 25, 1983, Section 6 (p. 10)

So does this deserve to be dumped on Christ? Does it deserve to be affixed to any one religious group? I say no. I say we should give long suffering Christians a break and let them crawl out from under the considerable weight and stickiness of the traditional Christmas Cake stigma. Let it be as universal, as it is universally despised!

And friends don’t send this “Holiday” Cake to friends. So find someone you really dislike, a mean teacher, an ex spouse, someone in political power, and send them all the cake you can.