By Camerron Martin
The holiday season is a time of many traditions. Foraging for a Christmas tree, getting together with family to celebrate the holiday, kissing under the mistletoe, and eagerly awaiting Santa Clause to deliver presents to the good children of the world. However, not every Christmas tradition is looked at so positively and there is one that is dreaded above all the rest. Receiving the gift of fruitcake.
There are many great choices for Christmas meals and snacks such as turkey, yams, sweet potatoes, gingerbread, potica, cookies and milk. Fruitcake is not one of those options. Almost everyone in America hates every aspect of a fruitcake and has done so for generations. It’s no secret that hating on fruitcake has become a joke tradition itself as people hope and pray they don’t receive a gift basket with some inside of it because someone thought it would make a great gag gift, because that is what it is most often used for.
Now if you are fortunate enough to not know what fruitcake is then consider yourself lucky, but in order to understand why it is so terrible you need to know what it is first. Fruitcake is basically what it sounds like, it is technically a cake made of fruit. However, it isn’t just made completely from fruit. It is more of a bread than a cake in reality and it is usually made from dried fruits, nuts, spices and often includes some kind of alcohol inside it. As you eat it, the fruits and nuts which are often set in the middle of the loaf are supposed to release a bursting amount of flavor and to be honest that is what happens, the flavor is just terrible.
The “fruit” part of fruitcake is what people often have the most problem with because unless it is homemade by someone who cares and actually knows how to cook, which even then doesn’t change the fact it tastes so bad, the fruit filling doesn’t much revolutionary flavor to what is basically a loaf of bread covered in spices and soaked in cheap whiskey. On top of the fact the fruitiness is extremely lackluster, the bread itself is more often than not extremely dry and bland, especially by the time you receive it as a gift which are almost always store bought. The closest related object when it comes to the texture of fruitcake is cardboard and I can say from experience that I would rather eat a sheet of that than a fruitcake.
No matter where it comes from or who makes it, fruitcake will likely remain at the rear end of Christmas until the end of time.
