By JIM SCHUH
of The Gazette
Did Santa Claus visit your house on Christmas Eve? Were you a good boy or girl during the past year? Did Santa leave nice presents for you? Or did you receive a fruitcake?
The fruitcake - man's least understood achievement - is also one of his most permanent creations. Once you receive a fruitcake, it never seems to disappear.
A few bakers and fruitcake aficionados always take exception to negative comments about the cake nobody seems to like or want. When I was on the radio, I always treaded softly when joking about fruitcakes, because if I went too far, the phones would ring and bakers (who were sponsors) would complain and threaten to cancel their advertising. The sales department fussed at us. What we should have done is reward their rantings with fruitcakes as Christmas presents.
Even though these weighty "delicacies" are the subject of constant ridicule, every time Christmas comes around, fruitcakes inevitably return. Johnny Carson claimed there was just one fruitcake - and it always came back at holiday time. These things are virtually indestructible.
Be honest now - do you know anyone who actually eats fruitcake? Remember that you are what you eat.
Fruitcakes can't be good for anybody - first off, they're very high in calories - and few of us need additional firepower during the holidays (or at any other time for that matter). Fruitcakes contain too much sugar, including all that candied fruit. Eating just one piece can make your teeth fall out - if not from the sugar content alone, from your inability to extricate your incisors and canines from the fruitcake itself.
I think there's a study claiming that recipes for fruitcake may be fallacious - some suspect they fail to list all the ingredients, a clear violation of USDA requirements. The conclusion of a panel of experts is that the recipe actually includes a hearty portion of Portland cement.
Another negative is research that shows fruitcakes cause 89 percent of all hernias, and an even higher percentage of toe injuries. I also have it on good authority that without these end-of-year concoctions, chiropractors would see more than half their patient load evaporate.
I know of only one good element resulting from American-made fruitcakes - their combined weight helps assure that our continent won't break loose from our spinning planet and fly off somewhere into space.
I understand a chemical warfare official at the Pentagon accidentally leaked some top secret information last week - perhaps you've already heard it - that if conventional weapons don't work to flush Osama bin Laden from his hiding places, a secret plan exists to drop fruitcakes on entrances to Afghanistan mountain caves. That threat alone should be enough to force him out. And word is that even the Stevens Point Board of Education is considering using a fruitcake in place of a wrecking ball as an inexpensive means of reducing the old Emerson School building to rubble.
Experiments have taken place in recent weeks on the strength of fruitcakes. A dispatch from the Reuters News Service told of the Reno (Nevada) Gazette-Journal's amazing and largely unproductive efforts to destroy fruitcakes. (Nevada is where a lot of secret tests take place.) Sharpshooters using M-11 automatic machine guns failed to decimate target fruitcakes - the best they could do was to "nibble" at their edges. The hail of bullets just couldn't disfigure the center of the commercial creations, which remained substantially intact after the barrage.
So the researchers came up with what they thought would be a sure way to wipe out fruitcakes - they'd take them to the top of a two-story building, and drop them to the pavement below. To their dismay, instead of crumbling, the test cakes merely sustained a few cracks. We didn't receive a report on what happened to the concrete, but my guess is that researchers discovered a new and cheap method of producing crushed gravel.
In the other test, investigators cranked up a 3,000 pound sport utility vehicle, and used it to run over a fruitcake. Reuters reports, "This proved to be more effective, leaving a 'tire-marked, raising-flecked smear on the asphalt.'" The conclusion from this test is that finally, SUVs are good for something.
The Reno paper says it got mostly favorable reviews for its tests, so it plans to do more next year, when the reporter who got the idea might drop a fruitcake from a helicopter. I hope she provides advance warning to those manning the nation's seismographs, because such a test will register an 8.3 reading on the Richter scale and cause widespread panic.
In an earlier column on fruitcakes, I mentioned that my late uncle always remembered me with the blackstrap molasses fruitcake he received as a Christmas gift from a supplier. That prompted The Gazette staff to buy a fruitcake, and trick me into believing it had arrived at the office from that same supplier as a response to my column. After I realized it was a joke, we all enjoyed a good laugh.
The landfill refused it, so if you still need a fruitcake, give me a call.
You may reach Jim Schuh at The Gazette, or by e-mail at jpschuh@yahoo.com.