A Life Told Through Stories . . .

December 25, 2021

The Saga of the Christmas Cake

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. This endless 2020-2021 has been a whole grove of lemons, so I won’t bore you with a Yuletide rehash of what has been a spectacularly horrid year for so many (although I have thrown in a few snaps at the end of this post). Instead let me tell you the Saga of the Christmas Cake.

For years I have intended to make the family Christmas Cake recipe. The recipe, or receipt as it was called back in the day, written in pencil by my darling grandmother, lacking precise measurements, calling for one or two obscure ingredients and matured with enough booze to make ladies in corsets swoon, it’s rumored to have been her grandmother’s cake.

Besides being well-seasoned, the recipe is also well-traveled. It probably originated from the UK, maybe snipped out of a mid-century Victorian ladies magazine and sent to family in India. There it graced the tables of more than a century of Christmases on a coffee estate nestled in the Nilgiri Hills. Upon my grandparent’s marriage, the recipe took a detour to Jamshedpur before flying off to London Town to make its debut.

I have memories of a cold, dark autumn evening, coming home to the warm smells of toasted almonds, burnt sugar and cardamom; Granny was making the family Christmas cake and I was in time to help stir, then lick the bowl.

Tenderly Gran nursed that cake from bowl to oven to cooling rack to a large Tupperware container. Lovingly she spooned the best quality brandy into the cake to keep it moist and rich. Next, she made the marzipan, rolling it out to a perfect circle and crowning the cake. Then she mixed up her special royal icing and, with an artistic flourish, decorated the cake. It was perfect and would finish off Christmas day festivities with an exclamation mark! Sometimes I think the extended family showed up on Christmas night just for a slice of that cake. There never seemed to be any left after the holiday.

We buried Gran on Christmas Eve 30 years ago. There was no cake that year. Each year since, I have sat down with that receipt on Stir-Up Sunday, the first Sunday in November, to read the directions. At best, they are scant, - sort of like the Mary Berry Challenge On the Great British Bake Show. Just gathering the ingredients would take a month of Sundays. I sigh deeply and say, “Maybe next year.”

And then 2020 came, and the Christian world celebrated its first Christmas in Lockdown. It didn’t feel very Christmassy at all. The rigors of teaching online had lost its charm, and with certain food items like flour and sugar scarce, never mind the glazed cherries and sultanas, I decided to leave the cake for yet another year.

Christmas Covid-Style

Entertaining Covid-Style

In late October 2021, with a burst of nostalgia and a hankering for how things used to be, I sat down with the recipe once again. And again, on careful reflection, I decided that I had been kidding myself all these years. The annual reading of the recipe is about as far I’m going to get to actually baking the cake.

So now you’re up to speed. Here’s the next installment of this story...

On November 16 still in the nostalgic glow, I ordered a Marks & Spencers Christmas cake. Brit and Commonwealth family and friends will understand that an M&S Christmas cake is a highly desirable luxury item and will serve as an excellent alternative to Granny’s. So, entirely satisfied with my purchase, feeling sure that Gran would understand, I sat back and waited for this gastronomic treat.

It was due on December 15. I raced home from work, excited to find a box on my doorstep; but it was addressed to my Dad (I could go into a whole thing about Dad, Amazon, FedEx, and his online ordering habit, but I won’t). Checking on my order, I stared blankly at the screen. The message read, “Shipment running late!”

On December 16 and 17; still running late.

On December 18, with visions of sugarplums disappearing from my head, I contacted Amazon, “Where is my cake?” I demanded. RFP from Amazon replied, “It’s stuck in Customs.” This is not good news.

The response came with a link to the Royal Mail, which I clicked, and yes, my cake was mailed on November 19 from Greenford, just a few miles from where I was born in London Town. But a second look at the tracking history caused me to gasp in horror - on December 3, the cake arrived in Curitiba, which my dear reader, is in Brazil!

“What the heck is my cake doing in Brazil?” I yelled at the computer. Clearly the alcohol content was a problem with the local Customs Officer. I felt the looming hand of despair grip my very soul, and I resigned myself to yet another year without a decent fruit cake for my afternoon Christmas tea.

The cake sat for days in Curitiba while I raged at my computer 4,000 miles north. But then, yesterday, Royal Mail sent an update: “The cake arrived in the US at 15:53. It was released from US Customs at 15:54.” Presumably the alcohol content was not a problem.

So far the Marks & Spencer’s cake has visited three continents, made it through two Custom offices and is now somewhere in the US of A. It’s the day before Christmas and I just don’t know how this story will end.

But it got me thinking… The hardest lesson I have learned during the Pandemic is that I am not in control of very much, except, perhaps, how I choose to respond to things. Life can be ugly and caustic, full of loneliness and loss. But as I heal from a long illness, I hope against hope that perhaps Hope is on its way. It will have matured a little, but it is still rich and dense and fruity and delicious and waiting to be savored. Hope’s like that somehow.

I know that John and Zoë and Lily and I have thrived in each other’s company, found a deeper way to relate to each other and as a family. We’ve each discovered new talents and passions. And we have pivoted (groan) to end up in very different places to the paths we were on pre-Pandemic.

Celebrating Mum's 87th birthday;
first get together for the Pettit Clan
and a big and very disappointing match for England
against some Euro-trash team in UEFA final.

First meeting of the Sibs in over a year

Visiting Sandra and Connor

"Indian" with David and Jolene, Boulder, CO

Mainly, we've have learned how to breathe again. We have learned that change is bracing and nothing to fear. We have learned the value of loving relationships and friendship. We have learned to “single-task” and take time to think and feel and be. And, as the world cautiously opens up again, I have learned that I don’t have to drag the past around like an albatross. No, like a New Year’s Day, it’s a fresh, clean page; out with the old, in with the new.