Twelve Blogs of Christmas, Part VIII:Christmas Foods

8 Christmas Foods
The Good and the Bad of Christmas Foods

8) Fruitcake - We've all heard the legend of the "re-gifted" fruitcake that lasts decades. My Granny Ruth would always seem to have them. I think the modern fruitcake is the butt of too many unfounded jokes. In fact, most fruitcakes are bought as jokes and never eaten. If fresh they are pretty good.

7) Nuts - I don't know if this is true everywhere but I always had a few of these in my stocking along with fruit. As kids we didn't really get into the whole nut thing. Especially the Brazil nut that I still to this day can't get into. Give me a pistachio or pecan any day. What makes me sad is to hear people say when they were kids they were happy to get nuts. I think half of them are just lying, half have fuzzy memories and half are just insane. (Insane like a man with 3 halves.)

6) Candy Canes - See below for Candy Cane myths. I like an ornament you can honestly eat. Unlike those ceramic gingerbread men!

5) Pies - It was hard to include pumpkin and not pecan. Other families have cherry or apple on Christmas every year, that just seems weird. Fruit pies are spring and summer pies to me.

4) Figgy Pudding - I liked to sing Frigging Pudding but some people would try to get offended about it. I've never actually had this Figgy pudding which goes to show that I will leave before I get some, despite my songs to the contrary.

3) Dip - For some reason the holidays have become a time to unveil new dips! I've had spinach with waterchestnuts. I've had creamcheese and candied jalipino. And there are the standards of ranch and french onion. I recall last Christmas my youngest niece Mary Cate kept eating and eating french onion dip. She loved it. Unfortunately she used the same Frito for every dip. Forget double dipping, we went past septuple and dodeca diping as well! About ever couple of minutes we'd change out the Frito because it became mostly mush.

2) Cookies & Gingerbread - I like those men. Yummy. I also like the idea of a gingerbread house although nobody ever lets you bend over and take a big chomp out of the side of one. I understand that to make them look good they become inedible. This is travesty. And of course Christmas cookies will always be awesome because they are fun to make, eat and bribe Santa with.

1) Sugarplums - This one got top honors because we all know about but nobody has ever actually seen one. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word sugarplum thusly: "A small round or oval sweetmeat, made of boiled sugared and variously flavoured and coloured; a comfit." I had to look up comfit next:

"Comfit, an archaic English word for an item of confectionery consisting of a
seed, or nut coated in several layers of sugar...In England these small, hard
sugar sweets were often made with caraway seeds, known for sweetening the breath (hence kissing comfits). Up to a dozen coats of syrup were needed before the
seeds were satisfactorily encrusted. Comfits were eaten a sweets. Confectioners
as early as the 17th century recognized by varying the proportions of sugar in
the syrup they could change the final texture, making pearled comfits or crisp
and ragged comfits."

I knew the word to basically ment candy since I read 'Alice in Wonderland' in elementary school. Alice has a box of comfits in her pocket. All that said, I'm still not sure if they are real. Perhaps the line "Visions of Sugarplums danced in their heads" is meant to indicate these are mythical (and hence facticious) candies.

The only thing I left off this list is the Christmas Goose because, lets face it, we eat turkey and it's more of a Thanksgiving thing now anyway.