Sharon Hill of Charleston recently emailed asking if we could reprint the fruitcake column written by longtime Gazette humor columnist Jim Dent. “It would be perfect for Christmas,” she wrote. She attached a scanned-in copy with her email, but the quality of the much-copied column was too hard to read.

Since my curiosity was piqued, I began searching the newspaper’s computer archives, thinking it couldn’t be hard to track down Dent’s fruitcake column.

It turned out not to be hard at all. In fact, I had plenty to choose from. Apparently, Dent had a thing about fruitcake. He wrote about them at least once a year, generally to agree with those proclaiming fruitcakes to be the most unwanted gift.

The Dent column the reader liked so well included tips for how to use 12 fruitcakes in one year, broken down on a month-by-month basis. For instance, in September, you can “give fruitcake to children to put in lockers at school before everybody gets their locks.” And in October, “Divide fruitcake into small bags and give it out on Trick or Treat night, being careful to close the door quickly so it can’t be thrown back.”

Since I’ve reached my ninth year as a columnist without once broaching this topic, I felt doing so might be an appropriate way to pay homage to the much beloved Dent.

I dedicated myself to the project, committing many minutes to exhaustive research deep in the bowels of Google. There I learned the history of fruitcake, recipes for fruitcake, and about the existence of an organized Society for the Protection and Preservation of Fruitcake.

I also learned there are many uses for fruitcake. In their take-off of the Worst Case Scenario books, authors Josua Piven and David Borgenicht wrote a “Holiday Worst Case Scenario Handbook” that instructs readers how to deal with embarrassing holiday situations.

One section of their book includes information on “How to repurpose a fruitcake.” Their suggested uses for the much-dreaded Christmas confectionery include using it as a dumbbell, a bookend, as art, or to block your car’s tires to prevent it from rolling when parked on a hill.

The town of Manitou Springs in Colorado holds an annual fruitcake tossing contest that draws hundreds of spectators for a variety of competitions, including one called “The Launch,” where participants bring fruitcake-launching devices. Prizes can also be won for the ugliest fruitcake and the most creative use of a fruitcake.

My investigation also led me to a web page dedicated to those with a shared hatred of fruitcake. It touted scientific research that included a test where fruitcake was offered to—and rejected by—not only birds, rats, mice, and ants, but cockroaches, too. (Test results on pregnant women and teenage boys were still pending.)

The site’s founder was inspired by his fruitcake-hating mother, who announced to the entire family one Christmas that if she ever got another fruitcake, she would use it as a doorstop. Sure enough, the next Christmas, someone gifted her with a fruitcake, so with “much pomp and ceremony, Mom installed the fruitcake as a doorstop to the living room, where it remains to this day, perfectly preserved. Ten years later.”

Ancient, well-preserved fruitcakes are nothing new. A Tecumseh, Michigan, family has a fruitcake that was made in 1878. Jim Dent wrote about this particular fruitcake back in 1987, when it was a mere 109 years old. According to Dent, “You put off cutting a fruitcake and then you put it off again, and again, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a 109-year-old cake on your hands.”

In spite of all the jokes about fruitcake, nearly 21 million are purchased each year in the U.S. alone.

I wonder how many are used to hold doors open.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.