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If you would have asked me about fruitcake when I was under the age of 13, I would not have known what it was.  I suppose it was a more common Christmas food in North Carolina than other places I had lived.  I had never heard of it when we got some as gifts and it was sliced and presented as a special food choice on buffet tables.  When I finally saw it, I thought it was worthy of a taste, it looked colorful and fun.  However, I was mistaken!  I really just couldn’t swallow it.  I don’t recall that anyone in my immediate family liked fruitcake and I think we just threw it away.

In preparation for this post I did a bit of playing around on the internet for Christmas fruitcake and found lots of humorous jokes and videos, including the classic Johnny Carson indestructible fruitcake (begins at 5:21), as well as serious websites such as the Society for the Protection and Preservation of Fuitcake with lots of links to stories, history and recipes.  I found these entertaining and I previously only had a vague notion of how strongly people view Christmas fruitcake.

For me, I do not have strong feelings about it at all.  I suppose I must have only had a bad fruitcake but I’m not so sure that I’m interested in trying it repeatedly in order to find a ‘good’ one.  Instead, since my husband’s a Jimmy Buffett fan, I’ll just settle on listening to Buffett’s Fruitcakes.

Here’s the chorus:

Fruitcakes in the kitchen (Fruitcakes in the kitchen)
Fruitcakes on the street (Fruitcakes on the street)
Struttin’ naked through the crosswalk
In the middle of the week
Half-baked cookies in the oven (Cookies in the oven)
Half-baked people on the bus (People on the bus)
There’s a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

This is my submission for the Advent Calendar Christmas Memories, 2009