The Fruitcake

My grandfather died in 1988.

He was a formal sort, nearly always wearing lace up boots and a three piece suit. And for Christmas, he had gift giving traditions - every year we got a fruitcake and a box of pecans. I can still remember sitting around shelling pecans with my mother's antique metal nutcracker, the kind that works like a vice with a screw. There's an exquisite delicate violence to the shelling, with the resulting simple pleasure of extracting the two halves of the nut intact.

The fruitcake was another story. It was always one of those commercial fruitcakes from somewhere down South, the kind that gives fruitcake a bad name. We'd duly put the fruitcake out for consumption at the big chaotic annual Christmas Eve party, and no one ate it, save a few ornery types, and children picking out the glacée cherries. Eventually, it would end up in the compost heap. But my mother always saved the tins - reusing them year after year for storing the dozens of Christmas cookies we made each December. After the cookies were gone, the tins went back into the pantry, to wait atop the freezer until the next December.

One year, round about 1992, my mother was rattling around in the pantry looking for a tin for a batch of cookies. She grabbed one and was startled to find that it wasn't empty. She opened it. Yup - fruitcake. Never opened, its cellophane wrapper intact, it looked perfect. It looked brand new. It looked like it had the the day it arrived, which, given the death of the giver back in 1988, meant it had arrived no later than Christmas of 1987. We oohed and aahed and put it back on top of the freezer. It seemed the only proper thing to do.

Since then, every year we have the unveiling of the fruitcake. For a number of years, it remained perfect, unchanged within its protective film. Then one year, we opened it and discovered that it was covered with a feathery white mold, inside the cellophane. The following year, the mold had transformed into a greyish feltlike covering. One year, we discovered that the plastic wrap had decayed and the fruitcake was oozing out. Sometime thereafter, it began eating through the tin and the tin had to be confined within a plastic bag.

We haven't yet had this year's unveiling - sometime later today, we'll retrieve it from its resting place and see how it's doing. We'll toast it with a glass of sherry, and gently return it to the top of the freezer. And Christmas will have come once again.