Notes from a Latter-day Scrooge
When Christmas season starts, sometime around September first, we have plenty of time to relearn that most of it is precisely the same, year after year. Santa, of course is everywhere—and candy canes, wrapped in celebratory cellophane, will be available for purchase long before anyone wants to eat one.
Christmas movies, naturally, are exactly the same—year after year. In case you’re not sure, check out ANY Hallmark movie (because Hallmark makes more Christmas movies than the rest of the known universe, combined). The plot of every Hallmark holiday movie is identical: the main character, who has become successful in the big city, is forced to return to their small-town origins, meet someone they wouldn’t even bother to ignore in their urban life, learn that caring for others is more important than business success (and yet their business will somehow thrive anyway)—and yet (surprise surprise) all this will happen because—of course—of a Christmas miracle.
There is one other, somewhat different, Christmas trope: everyone hates a fruitcake, and—once having received one—will go to almost any length to regift it to an unsuspecting victim. Certain fruitcakes are alleged to have been in constant circulation for generation upon generation. Edward Gorey found one way to shift fruitcake off the endless cycle of reincarnation:
There’s so much unendurable bonhomie on the Christmas docket that—by the middle of August—I’m mightily sick of caring about other people. Consequently. this year, back at Thanksgiving, I made a mince pie (even ‘though practically no one else around here likes it). That meant that I got to eat most of it myself. That suggested that part of the holiday might actually be for me. Then I realized that I actually like fruitcake, but never get to have it since no one else can bear it.
Every snowbird who has ever driven down I-95 to Florida—in the dead of a northern winter—has seen billboards for the famous Claxton fruitcake… the name has been as firmly implanted in my brain as thoroughly as all the “Pedro says” signs for South of the Border.
Yesterday, I broke down and bought a Claxton fruitcake—just for me. It was my own private Christmas miracle!
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