An Evening of Fruitcake...
How could we miss the Lake Tahoe Historical Society's unique and entertaining holiday/history program, You’ll Never Escape the Fruitcake? The program was described as "a jolly romp through the tangled tinsel of Christmas traditions! From the noble origins of Christmas trees to the mysterious persistence of fruitcake (which scientists now believe may be immortal), local authors and historians David and Gayle Woodruff unwrap the weird, the wonderful, and the wildly nostalgic in a 55-minute living history presentation. It’s history with a side of ho-ho-hilarity—bring your cheer, your curiosity, and your own favorite memories of the holiday season."
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The evening began with connection with old and new friends. Nothing brings people together like fruitcake!
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Classically horrible and barely able to compete with the likes of Christmas pudding, fruitcake has long been the subject of wonder when it comes to the holidays. After all, it seems like no matter what you do to it, the fruitcake always returns. For decades people have been joking about what makes fruitcake so funny, or nasty, and about the countless other things you can do with it besides eat it (i.e. use it as a doorstop). And a few people along the way have made some hilarious jokes about the dreaded holiday "dessert" that still crack us up including Johnny Carson who famously quipped, "The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other."
Two friends from Iowa have been exchanging the same fruitcake since the late 1950s. Even older is the fruitcake left behind in Antarctica by the explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1910. But the honor for the oldest known existing fruitcake goes to one that was baked in 1878 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the United States.
What’s amazing about these old fruitcakes is that people have tasted them and lived, meaning they are still edible after all these years. The trifecta of sugar, low moisture ingredients and some high-proof spirits make fruitcakes some of the longest-lasting foods in the world.
I loved this fact... Credit for the fruitcake’s popularity in America should at least partially go to the US Post Office. The institution of Rural Free Delivery in 1896 and the addition of the Parcel Post service in 1913 caused an explosion of mail-order foods in America. Overnight, once rare delicacies were a mere mail-order envelope away for people anywhere who could afford them.
Given fruitcake’s long shelf life and dense texture, it was a natural for a mail-order food business. America’s two most famous fruitcake companies, Claxton’s of Claxton, Georgia, and Collin Street of Corsicana, Texas, got their start in this heyday of mail-order food. By the early 1900s, US mailrooms were full of the now ubiquitous fruitcake tins.
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"For months they have lain in wait,
dim shapes lurking in the forgotten corners of houses
and factories all over the country
and now they are upon us, sodden with alcohol,
their massive bodies bulging with strange green protuberances,
attacking us in our homes, at our friends' homes, at our offices
— there is no escape, it is the hour of the fruitcake."
— Deborah Papier
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