Christmas traditions etc.

[Mickwhitt 4,642]

Hi all.

Mrs whitts is currently basking in the sun in Spain for a week. She and a gang of girls trip off every now and then to give me a minutes peace.

So I decided to bake my Christmas fruit cakes while she's safely out of the way.

Mainly because the kitchen looks like a bomb site after She boils an egg.

There are now six fruit cake loaves sitting in a container, being "fed" with brandy which helps preserve them and adds flavour. 

It's been a part of my family to bake fruit cakes for Christmas, my mum doing the honours until she passed a few year back. So I have taken on the mantle as it were.

I would love to hear of seasonal recipes or traditional things people do away from these shores.

It's just starting to get "Backendish" here which is autumn. So thoughts turn to the festive season.

Things have changed massively since I was a boy,  the weather no longer allows us to build ice slides,  or build snowmen etc. Christmas is far more commercial and multicultural ideas mean kids learn more about other religions than good ole' C of E.

Let me know what you will be planning for the holidays. 

Best regards as ever Mick 

[lynnmor 7,308]

What do you do with the old fruit cakes?  I believe each family over here just recycles them each Christmas, nobody actually eats the things. 

[Skwerl58 704]

Great tradition that you have. Continuing a family tradition is importatant for lots of reasons but for me it is respect for others before you and sharing with the younger ones. I love fruit cake and had one made by an elderly European lady and it was the best I had ever tasted. Our Family gets together on Christmas Eve and we  have a  ham and all the fixin's and some  type of venison whether stew or roast. We usually get together and hunt on Thanksgiving morning. Great times!

[953 nut 55,320]

No actual tradition was established by this but there was a rater humorous Christmas about 20 +/- years ago that is memorable. I had been buying wheel horse parts and car parts on for some time but my wife hadn't ever gotten into using any online shopping sites.

As Christmas approached I began buying some small things as gifts for my wife's stocking stuffers. At that time you didn't have any tracking on the packages so you didn't know if it had been shipped or when to expect it. With only a couple of days to go I was frustrated by the fact that most of my purchases had not arrived.

Christmas morning my wife brought in a bunch of beautifully wrapped packages with my name on them she had stashed in the trunk of her car. When it came time to unwrap gifts it became apparent that she had wrapped her own gifts as they were being delivered not knowing what they were. She presumed they were stuff I wanted and since she never went on eBay she had no idea they were hers.Probably a good thing,       my wife is much better at wrapping gifts than I will ever be.

[8ntruck 7,016]

Fruit cakes and Christmas.  Growing up, my dad would always get a fruit cake from his office, usually just after Thanksgiving.  Was a large one, too.  It would keep our family of 5 in fruit cake through December and most of January.  I always looked forward to getting a piece that contained a candied cherry.

 

Once I got married, I discovered that my wife's family did not enjoy fruit cakes as much.  One year, a fruit cake showed up at the Christmas Eve gathering as a gift.  It ended up not going home with the original recipient, but sneaked into someone else's car.

 

It showed up again at the next year's Christmas gathering - this time decorated with a Chiea Pet Christmas tree. Later that year, it showed up at a birthday gathering with different decorations. Thus began several years of 'passing the fruit cake', usually at birthdays and Christmas.

 

If you received it, it was your duty to pass it on to another family member at a family gathering as quickly as possible.  That fruit cake was decorated in many themes - trolls, wreaths, grim reaper for a 40th birthday, troll dressed in a 'mink' stole as a matriarch for my wife's mother's 50th birthday.  It broke somewhere along the line, so it was wrapped with duct tape to 'repair' it.  Somebody applied a coat of varnish to 'preserve' it.

 

After a while, we were attending gatherings expecting the fruit cake to show up, but it didn't.  We finally asked the niece who was known as the last holder of the fruit cake what happened to it. She sheepishly admitted that it was in the trunk of her car - momentarily forgotten when she sold it.

 

We all got a good laugh imagining the reaction of the person when they found the box in the trunk of their just purchased used car and opened it to discover a plastic wreath with a duck taped fruit cake in the center decorated with a troll doll with a mink stoll, black cape, and holding a stythe.

[JoeM 7,874]

As far as cakes go, at work we had a guy and his wife that would bake rum cakes. bunt style. 

Could not get the recipe, boy they were as good as I ever had.  

(then the co got a zero tolerance thing and all that went away) 

 

 

[Ed Kennell 38,227]

Of course, the traditional roast turkey is there for Thanksgiving and Christmas and baked ham for Easter.   But the Oyster Stuffing is the must have dish at all our holiday dinners.

Edited October 1, 2023 by Ed Kennell