Season’s greetings, dear friends, from my little corner of cyberspace to yours.  If I’ve been neglecting your posts lately, please accept my sincere apologies.  Due to extenuating circumstances, my OS time has been severely limited these past few weeks.

Every year, right around Pearl Harbor Day, I am seized by an irrational yet utterly irresistible desire to start churning out massive quantities of homemade fruitcake. Don’t ask me why; I suspect it may be genetic.  My mother was a fruitcake baker, and her mother before her, and probably her mother’s mother before that.  In fact, I would venture to guess that the women in our family began their tradition of making fruitcake sometime during the dawn of the Neolithic Era.  And who knows, a few of those dense, fruit-studded loaves may still be kicking around somewhere.  As any connoisseur will tell you, fruitcakes, like people, grow more complex and interesting with age, especially when helped along by the judicious application of rum or brandy. 

Every year, I make 17 pounds of fruitcake, completely from scratch, and I mean scratch.  I even candy my own orange peel and citron, a sticky mess of a project that always seems to coincide with that exact moment in the insect life cycle when all the ants in our yard decide it’s time to break camp and move into my kitchen.  Ants adore my fruitcake, which, sad to say, puts them in a distinct minority around here.  My husband, who’s strictly a chocolate guy (B-O-R-I-N-G), loathes the stuff.  Last year, he insisted on using his allotment as bait in the thirty mouse traps we have in continuous operation down in our basement.  Not such a good idea.  The mice ignored the fruitcake entirely, leaving it for the ants, and just licked off the booze.  It was a party they’re still squeaking about in rodent circles.        

Did I mention that I also grow the oranges and citron?  From my own trees?  Doing things the hard way is expected in this little pocket of rural utopia we call home; I also knit sweaters from recycled dog hair and raise my own eggs, from actual chickens.  Which may explain, at least partially, what’s gone wrong with my grand scheme to write a novel one day.  I first knew my literary ambitions were in serious trouble the day I found myself rendering my own lard, an arduous endeavor involving huge cauldrons of bubbling pork fat whose mere vapors can elevate one’s triglycerides to dangerous levels.  But who cares!  Because homemade piecrusts made with hand-rendered lard are so, so delicious!  Tender, flaky…almost as good as the Marie Callender pies you find in the frozen food aisle of most major grocers.  Unfortunately, local palates have evolved to the point where we can detect high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil in dilutions as little as one part per billion, so cheating with store bought is, alas, out of the question.

To say that we’re a little obsessive about what goes into our stomachs in this part of the world is like saying that Cher has a casual interest in cosmetic surgical enhancement.  For us, the cultivation, preparation and enjoyment of food is almost a spiritual thing; sort of like being Presbyterian, only instead of Judeo-Christian-type monotheism, we’re more into heirloom varieties of zucchini and free range chicken.  The Lamb of God may be fine for some folks, but the lamb of man, sustainably raised on organically-certified pasture, marinated in pomegranate juice, then rubbed with fresh herbs and grilled over mesquite to the perfect degree of doneness is, for most folks around here, as good as it gets in the way of transcendent experience.

As a matter of fact, outside the local Hispanic population, which single-handedly keeps the area Catholics in business, and a small band of elderly Unitarians, I don’t believe we have any residents who regularly attend traditional religious observations.  Beyond the worship of food, the rest of us tend to gravitate towards the more mystical Eastern faiths, belief systems that involve things like karma and dharma and copious amounts of whole grain rice.  Our homes are easily identified by the Tibetan prayer flags we like to string up over our vegetable beds, hoping perhaps for the miraculous to occur:  a tomato that will grow in our nearly continuous  summer fog.  So far, at least in my case, the flags have proven to be purely decorative.  You might say they’re Northern California’s answer to the concrete lawn goose.

But wait a minute…I’m supposed to be telling you about fruitcake.  For three weeks now, I’ve been lining loaf pans, sifting flour, measuring spices, chopping fruits and nuts, creaming butter, pouring molasses and, as I mentioned before, candying citrus peel.  Even for a galley slave like me, producing seventeen pounds of fruitcake is the culinary equivalent of running a marathon, only instead of a toned body and cholesterol in the low 130s, all I’ve got to show for my efforts is a standing appointment with my dentist and a lot of neighbors who avoid me at this time of the year.  I guess they’re in my husband’s camp, too.  I don’t understand people who dislike fruitcake.  Nor do I understand myself for persisting in making it.  The pleasure, I’ve come to realize, is in the creation.  Fruitcake, come to think of it, is a little like blogging:  a labor of love to be savored for its own sake, regardless of extraneous reward.  But unlike a post on the internet, whose life is more fleeting than a moth’s, a fruitcake will last at least until next year, when I can start the whole thing up once again.

My dentist, by the way, was also Ken Kesey’s dentist back in the 1960s.  Ken Kesey, you may recall, is the guy who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the novel about life among the chronically insane. 

Somehow it seems appropriate.

Happy Holidays to all!

Laurel