I would give a lot for some of my mom’s fruitcake this Christmas

Fruitcake. It’s the one substance guaranteed to ruin what might otherwise be a happy holiday.

Yeah, I know there are people who love fruitcake. There also are people who enjoy Pauly Shore movies and the singing of Michael Bolton. This does not make any of those things—Shore, Bolton, or fruitcake—good.

While I have always felt free to express my dislike of Shore and Bolton, I was, for decades, forced to pretend I enjoy fruitcake. Why? Because I’m Irish, Catholic, and every year at Christmastime, my mother would make me one of those god-awful bricks of dough and pickled fruit. And when a good Irish Catholic boy’s mother presents him with a fruitcake—or any gift—the aforementioned Irish Catholic boy pretends he likes it, no matter what. It’s the law.

The holiday fruitcakes started coming the first Christmas after I married Wife Number One and moved out of the house. Wife Number One loved my mother’s fruitcake, and made the mistake of telling her so, thereby ensuring we would receive one each and every Christmas thereafter.

This was not a problem for so long as I was married to Wife Number One (five years, as it turned out). But when we went our separate ways, the fruitcakes kept coming.

This left me in the unenviable position of either a) eating the fruitcake myself, which was unthinkable, or b) throwing away perfectly good food, also unthinkable. There were—or so I had been brought up to believe—starving children in China who would sell their oxen for just one bite of my mother’s fruitcake. In later years it occurred to me that those starving children could just eat the ox if it came to that, but at the time the argument seemed plausible.

Faced with these choices, I would usually eat one small slice of fruitcake, heavily laden with Cool Whip to mask the flavor, just to assuage the guilt. What was left I would wrap in aluminum foil and place on a back refrigerator shelf. There the fruitcake would sit, week after week, month after month. Eventually, usually by July or August, I would toss out the moss-covered block, all the while mumbling to myself about what a shame it was that the fruitcake had gone bad.

This went on year after year after year. My mother lovingly crafted her fruitcake and gave it to me with a satisfied smile, secure in the knowledge that she was bringing some happiness into the life of her eldest son.

Then I ruined everything. After nearly 30 years of silence, I broke down and told my mom how I felt about fruitcake. Honesty, I decided in a moment of pitiable self-delusion, was the best policy.

“Oh,” my mother said, doing her best to hide her disappointment, “why didn’t you tell me?”

A fair question, but impossible to answer. I shrugged. That year my mother gave my fruitcake to my sister.

That was five years ago and I haven’t had a fruitcake in my house since.

I wish I had one this year. Shortly after I shared the truth with my mom, she stopped baking fruitcakes altogether. Then she stopped cooking, washing, cleaning house, dressing herself … the doctors said it was Alzheimer’s.

The drugs slowed it down, but not enough. When I visit her this Christmas, she won’t know who I am. She doesn’t know who she is. It will be a miracle, and not a kind one, if she’s still here next Christmas.

This is the woman who taught me to tie my shoes, who bandaged my scraped knees and made homemade chicken soup to battle my colds; the woman who spent the best years of her life making sure my life was good.

And I couldn’t pretend for just a little while longer that I loved her fruitcake.

If she could give me one this year, I swear I’d wake up Christmas morning, eat the whole damn thing, and count myself lucky.

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