Fruitcake Weather

When I was a kid, we were lucky enough to have Christmas traditions started by our family. Not generational traditions, but rather things that we started and did most Christmas seasons. Some traditions lived longer than others, some were weather dependent like ice skating on the nearby gravel quarry ponds. Mostly these were little things, but they were special to us. We had a toy mailbox bank that was army green, as they really were in those days. We would put money in the bank all year long, and at Christmas we would open the bank and count out the money. It would be used for our summer vacation in Illinois. One time we even saved $90, a fortune.

We gathered our own holiday greens and often even cut our own tree from along the railroad tracks outside of town. My father, a railroader, always felt comfortable about this, since he was likely to know anybody stopping us and asking us what we doing. We also went north to see the enormous decorated Holly tree that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened to the public during the holiday season. My sister and I baked cookies with our mother, and we always had raw oysters chilling in the icy shade of the back porch. Christmas week, we would always reserve one night to bundle up and go for a family drive around the city to see the festive Christmas lights that proud homeowners would string on their homes and property.

We also had TV traditions. We always had to watch 'A Christmas Carol' on Christmas eve, the same old classic version with Alastair Sim. We would turn all the lights down low and watch it in the dark to make it even spookier. We also looked for new Christmas shows; there was at least one new one every year, but usually they were the usual pablum. Then one year, 1966, we happened to watch ABC Stage 67 production of "Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory". Geraldine Page won an emmy award for her role as Capote's "cousin" in the depression era story of making fruitcakes. This was one  of those life changing stories that goes to the heart of your very being. It's the tale of the magic of youth and the richness of life instead of riches. Capote narrates the sad tale of his youth as Buddy and his eccentric "cousin" who doesn't have a name in the story, in making fruitcakes which they give away to their special friends.

The popular one hour production ran each season for several years afterward, and then began to fade away, resurrected occasionally on PBS. Then by the mid 70's it had disappeared completely from the world of TV. In the meantime, I had grown and left home, our little traditions only a memory for me as well. But I still remembered them and I really missed "A Christmas Memory". Then one Christmas season about 1975, I was in the library thinking about the story and remembering that it was adapted from a Capote story. I found it! I took the novella off the shelf and went to one of the big plush chairs next to windows in the setting afternoon winter sun and spent a wonderful and tearful hour reading it for the first time, but with each word I was seeing Buddy and the old woman. For several years after that, reading it at Christmas became my new tradition.

But reading the story wasn't the only tradition that started that year. I started making fruitcakes. I found a recipe in an old cookbook, They were terrible. I certainly didn't send cakes to my friends that year. But since I lived alone, I had acquired some pretty good cooking skills, and I began adapting the recipe  to what I thought a good fruitcake should be. I still have that original recipe, but I have changed it so much it bears little resemblance to the original. I have been making fruitcakes for thirty years now, sending them to friends and family as my Christmas present to them. Not something that I bought either a trifle or a trinket, but something that is a part of me, a piece of my history.

For years the fruitcake batch grew until it was a 30 pound mass of batter and perserved fruits. But this is the first year that it will shrink. Friends move and lose touch, relatives have died, others can't eat sweets anymore. But still, I woke up this morning and the ground was hard and white with frost, and I thought "It's fruitcake weather!".

Comments

[Becky]

Thanks for bringing back those great Christmas memories! I had forgotten about my aunt Esther's fruit cake....hated it as a kid, but would love to have some now :)

[Steve Smith]

Good memories....and touching. I lost my mom in January....and your message reminded me of those wonderful fruit cakes and another (more southern) traditional Christmas cake....orange slice cake...yum! Mom would always make about half dozen of the two...three each and share them (halves ....cause they were so big) with family and friends. Guess it's my turn to hone those skills....looks like a store trip tomorrow and a day in the kitchen soon. Thanks for a nice Christmas message.