The story I’m about to tell you is true.
It’s a Christmas tale. A tale as traditional in American Yuletide lore as Santa Claus or Rudolph or mistletoe.
About this time last year a local company gave me an early Christmas gift. In a bright Christmasy tin can. It was a fruitcake.
Since my younger son’s family planned to spend the holidays
with his wife’s folks in
That night when he opened this heavier-than-normal package, he was polite but obviously a bit dismayed at his father’s weird choice of gifts.
But I raised him right. Sometime that evening, before his own little family rose early the next morning to surround the same Christmas tree for their own private exchange of gifts, he sneaked around and re-wrapped the fruitcake, which he then mingled in with his wife’s special presents.
But the saga of the fruitcake did not end there. In the few
hours before she and my grandsons boarded the plane to
Then came the calamity that should never happen to any self-respecting American fruitcake. Not knowing the poor cake’s short but illustrious history, those New Yorkers actually ate it!
If my space were not so scarce and if I were not so kind, a West Texan like me would have to make some sort of crack here about Yankee behavior. But that’s not the point of this story.
This is. Of all the gifts we exchanged last Christmas, that silly
fruitcake was the most memorable. It was bestowed on more people, it provoked
more laughter, it conveyed more cheer than any other gift we put under our
tree. Just as the peasant’s baby, the seemingly insignificant gift God gave the
world in