Monday, December 25, 2006

A note to a friend on Christmas day

When my beloved and I finally got home, circa 12:30 A.M. Christmas Eve after more than 24 hours in transit from France (a long story I will write about in the near future), we found a huge pile of correspondence that we were unable to get all the way through until today. In that pile, I found a Christmas card from a special category of sender- Dear Friend Whom I Have Never Met. It was like having another present to unwrap. This post is addressed to the sender of that card.

The card’s message was about the deficiencies of a man who eats fruitcake, and for most of my life I would have agreed with it- still do, in fact, for the man who eats normal fruitcake. But just about twenty years ago I found... the fruitcake. It was an experience even more profound than Sherlock Holmes’ finding the woman. Baked by Trappist monks in New York, the fruit and nuts are of the highest quality... the cake of a recipe Lucifer was thrown from Heaven for stealing... aged... soaked in fine brandy, then glazed to hold the brandy in while it ages... this is a fruitcake that is only available mail-order, and one must exercise extreme restraint in making out the order to only get what you have rationed yourself, for once it has arrived no further restraint is possible; no matter how much you have ordered, it will be only one serving. Try it if you dare, here

1 comment:

Lilylou said...

And then there's "we never eat cookies because they have yeast, and one little bite turns a man to a beast, o can you imagine a sadder disgrace than a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face"---------to say nothing of the other numberless verses of that same ditty.