Christmas swag

[gwalla]

Got a nice haul for Christmas this year. The highlight was the Batman: The Animated Series DVD box set vol. 1. I also got a bottle of Lustau rare cream sherry—not the type I'd had before that I really liked, but they don't seem to make that anymore. I also got a book of haiku and Trask's Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. The latter had been on my Amazon wishlist for a while, but I never really expected anyone to buy it for me, so it was quite a surprise (of the pleasant variety). And I got some new polo shirts, which I kinda needed. In my stocking, I got a bunch of candy, including a chocolate bar with black sesame seeds, ginger, and wasabi (!), a mini-bottle of Drambuie, a mini-bottle of

My mom got me Will Eisner's Shop Talk. Unfortunately, I already had a copy. So she's going to get me a new bookcase (which I really need, as about half of my books are piled on the floor with no other place to put them). I also got a new pair of slippers, but it turns out they aren't washable, which is why I wanted new slippers in the first place. They're also too tight to just slip on, although they are my size.

But that stuff isn't important. The important part is Christmas dinner! Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding...yum! And trifle, fruitcake*, and chocolates for dessert. Some families eat to live; the Wallaces live to eat.

*Why are people always hating on fruitcake? Fruitcake is awesome. Maybe my mom is the only person who knows how to make a good one?

Comments

[derakon.livejournal.com]

Where's the Asian foodstuffs? I expected better of you. ;p

Idly, fruitcake is a running joke, not a food. Or so most people would have you believe.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Asian food? On Christmas? What are you on?

Besides, doesn't wasabi chocolate count?

[cholma.livejournal.com]

I like fruitcake, as long as it's moist. It's the dry, concrete kind that gives the good stuff a bad rap.

[schol-r-lea.livejournal.com]

Agreed (though IIRC, panatone, which is an Italian fruitcake that some family friends used to make when I was younger, is actually supposed to be dry; it's more of a fruit bread than a cake, very different from the sort of fruitcake most people think of, and you usually would put butter or cream cheese on it). Good fruitcake is quite nice, but uncommon. Some of the ones I've tasted were hard enough to use as construction material, and as flavorful as sand.

However, it's bad reputation comes less from the quality of the fruitcake itself as from the way it's given. The main knock on fruitcake is that it is often seen as a thoughtless, cheapo, and overly-bland gift, akin to a fruit basket or a gift certificate. Most people think of it as something you give to disliked relatives and unfamiliar co-workers or neighbors - people you are obligated to give a gift to but don't know well enough or care enough about to think of something particularly for them. While this applies mostly to store-bought fruitcake - especially the canned or vaccuum-sealed variety which are very obviously designed more for thier shelf life than their flavor - but even home-made fruitcake is often seen as a kind of default gift, when the giver is the sort of person who would make up several of them to give away.