Christmas Memories & Fruitcake

The majority of us over age 50 remember a very specific and traditional Christmas. We always had a real tree, decorated it with strings of colorful lights, usually red and green bulbs, the kind you had to screw in and of course tons of tacky, beautiful, shiny silver tinsel. We always put out a glass of milk and some cookies for Santa and I was delighted Christmas morning when I saw that he took a bite of the cookies. I figured he couldn’t finish them because he was in a rush to get to all the other houses and deliver gifts.

I remember one time at my grandmother’s house in Austin. I was in bed Christmas Eve, and I swear I heard elves on the roof. They made a high-pitched little noise when they were talking, and I could hear them pulling the sleigh up onto the roof just over my head, as the sounds came down through the ceiling and straight into my ears. You would think I’d want to run outside to see them. But, oh man, instead I was paralyzed with fear. I managed to fall out of bed, make a beeline for my mom and jump into bed with her. Everyone in the house was asleep so I know it wasn’t my dad outside making noise. Still to this day, at least 60 years later, I don’t know what I heard, but I want to believe it really was Santa, his reindeer and his elves.

Gift giving is fun, too. No matter how old you are, everyone loves to open presents. My son and his wife are adults, there’s nothing they need that they can’t acquire themselves, but every year I put together a box of gifts for them to put under their tree and mail it to them in Minneapolis. Nothing extravagant, and sometimes I like to mail them H-E-B products since there are no H-EBs in Minneapolis. Can you imagine? I may never leave Texas because I love H-E-B too much.

One Christmas we were traveling down the highway on the way to my grandmother’s house. There was a sailor hitchhiking and my dad picked him up. My mother was not happy about picking up this stranger considering she had three small children in the backseat. Even as a small child I could feel her tension. But my dad, being a Marine, had no qualms picking up a fellow serviceman. As it turned out, he became a family friend and my mother and father gave him a carton of cigarettes for Christmas. Yes, that is correct, it was not uncommon in the 60s to give cigarettes as a Christmas gift.

My mother would often trade in her S&H Green stamps at the S&H Green stamp store. You acquired these stamps when you shopped at the grocery store or other establishments; they would give you so many stamps based on how much you spent at that particular store and then you would paste them into a book; that was my job, pasting in the stamps. Once the book got full, you could go to the S&H Green stamp store and trade them in for household goods or gifts, and if it was around the holidays, find nice Christmas presents for friends and relatives.

And then there’s fruitcake. I happen to like it. There, I said it out loud. My mother used to make a blonde fruitcake that had lots of lemon and rum in it. So delicious. One of my favorite fruitcakes is from Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana. They have tons more than traditional fruitcake, they have chocolate covered fruitcake bites, fruitcakes loaded with Texas pecans, a huge variety, something for everyone, in fact it might make a lover of fruitcake out of you too.

I wish everyone a beautiful Christmas with lots of love, laughter, great food and maybe a little fruitcake!