My grandmother, for some reason, loves mail order fruit cake and thinks it is just the greatest thing ever to be made. Of course this is a woman who buys large boxes of frozen chicken sandwiches from Sam's because they are wonderful and loves slim fast shakes with a passion, also a woman who will not pump her own gas. I do not know how she gets gas anymore as I think the last full service station in her town closed. I guess my uncle fills up her car each week or something.

Anyway, she loves it and thinks I do too. And when she thinks one of her grandchildren love a particular food there will be piles of it each time we come to visit and we are expected to deplete said piles of food by the time we leave, no matter how long or short out stay. This is why for years every time we would go there she would make gallons and gallons of tuna salad and we would have non-stop tuna salad eating times for the durration of our stay. And then there was the time she found out my sister liked the coleslaw from a particular resteraunt in town and every time we would go there she would have a couple gallons of this stuff in her fridge for us to eat and be hurt if we did not finnish it.

She has gotten a little wiser with age, there are no longer gallons of tuna or coleslaw when we go back, but every christmas she will expect us to eat this awefuly stale and horribly gummy fruitcake.


I hear tale that my great grandmother, I think her maternal grandmother, used to hide fruitcakes about her house, in all manner of places, and would not let anyone else near them. Then she would eat them in paper thin slices, slices that amazed everyone else, you could read through these slices it is said, conserving the cakes from Christmas to Christmas. When she died they found a dozen or so cakes of varing ages and hardness hidden about the house. From the stories I have heard told I expect that if that house is still standing (I havn't been to that part of Spartenburg, or any part of Spartenburg, in a long long time now) that there are still some fruitcakes hidden in places no one has yet thought to look. I imagine when they tear the house down they will find the rest.