CSotD: Tradition and taste
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It's fitting, I think, that "Between Friends" would feature the first fruitcake joke to make me laugh in more or less forever.
I consider fruitcake jokes to be lazy, one of a number of comic kneejerk gags that kind of straddle the ho-hum of Santa caught in the chimney and gags about animals without opposable thumbs. The former is just a tired old gag, the latter is based on the idea that, if Gary Larson got a laugh using an obscure phrase from biology class, it will also be funny when you say it. Thirty years and a kabillion repetitions later.
But Sandra Bell Lundy doesn't just riff on "everyone hates fruitcake." Rather, she riffs on the idea that we have certain traditions that matter because they are traditions.
And on the idea that part of growing up is, well, growing up. Expanding your horizons. Recognizing that it's not all about your immediate needs.
Realizing that you have actually come to value something beyond the obvious.
At which point, the conversation goes in two directions:
On the one path, we have the idea that, yes, there are things we associate with certain occasions that would be out of place other times. For instance, green bean casserole.
Every once in awhile, some young bride will try to make green bean casserole "good," using fresh or frozen beans, white sauce and mushrooms and real onion rings on top. The result is a disaster, because (A) it still doesn't taste good and (B) it also doesn't taste like green bean casserole, which we eat because that's what we eat at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We don't like green bean casserole. We like Thanksgiving and Christmas, and green bean casserole — properly made — is a sensory bridge to holidays past and gone, and people past and gone, and feelings past and gone.
You may prefer poppy seeds to sesame seeds, but "Open Poppy!" doesn't budge the rock.
And then there's this: Part of being a grown-up is also being open to the idea that things you liked as a child you may not like as an adult, and — here's the important part — vice versa.
Granted, it's a minority opinion. I heard a commercial on the radio yesterday explaining that, if you like to drink bourbon but don't like the burn in your mouth, you can buy this other bourbon that doesn't taste like much of anything at all but is guaranteed to get you off.
Not quite how they phrased it, but bourbon is now hip, which means that people feel compelled to drink it, and so, for those who are permanently stuck at the Nestle's Quik stage of gustatory development, the distilleries are offering cherry bourbon and honey bourbon and maple bourbon and other forms of non-bourbon-bourbon.
The difference between that and a whiskey sour or a Seven-and-Seven is that you can pretend you're drinking a grown-up drink. What good is a Shirley Temple, after all, if it doesn't look like a real cocktail?
Well, and the other distinction is that Seven-and-Seven isn't made with bourbon. It's made with Seagram's, which is Canadian whiskey, and whose CEO just died this week. That obit includes this sentence:
“How much business Father and his brothers did with bootleggers was never clear,” Mr. Bronfman wrote.
I include that because I feel this blog should work in some jokes whenever possible.
Especially if I can also work in a Christopher Baldwin illustration for a children's book we did about bootleggers on the northern border.
But this isn't too much drift, because, just as growing up can mean developing a taste for whiskey and black coffee and black-and-white movies, it can also mean learning to appreciate a rich, dark fruitcake, which you could find at Ogilvy in Montreal.
Which is in Canada, where Between Friends is set, though over there in Ontario, it was Ogilvy's with an apostrophe-S comme en anglais.
Ogilvy in Montreal is a charming island of Anglophilia — perhaps even "Anglomania" — in an otherwise bilingual world. Dickens was still alive when Ogilvy opened its doors in 1866 and, once inside, you'll suspect he has not died yet. When I was living a few miles south of the border, it was a good place to pick up obscure Penguin titles, but a magnificent place for Christmas shopping.
Including real fruitcake, which is the anti-green-bean-casserole in that the ersatz, yellow, light crappy "improved" version they sell in stores this time of year carries no sensory messages at all, and only the good stuff that children don't like evokes the gracious past.
And you can soak it in bourbon, rum or, yes, Canadian whiskey for a few weeks or months or a year before you eat it.
And for those who like their cake sweet and their whiskey sweeter, well, in the words of my white-haired little old mum, "Good! That's more for the rest of us!"
Peasants.
I ate a slice of wonderful, heavy, rum-soaked fruitcake while writing this, the gift of a British-born friend whose greyhound, Birdie, is a dogpark friend of my ridgeback, Vaska. It pays to rant, you see, because it inspired her to make a pair of old-fashioned fruitcakes and they turned out very well, indeed.
And there's no rule against eating pastries at six-thirty in the morning, is there?
No, there ishn't.
And speaking of the Bronfmans …
Edge City notes another tradition, which has not gone unremarked upon by Jewish standups in recent years but which I thought was quite well done here and also an interesting approach for a strip that is about a modern, suburban Jewish-American family and so includes both High Holidays and sometimes being a little out of the mainstream.
It's interesting to see how some strips mark the day, others give it a wink by injecting it into their continuing story arc and others totally ignore it. This was an original approach, and a very nice one.
Lest we forget
Editors are always looking for a holiday-themed panel. Steve Breen's isn't going to win a Pulitzer, but it's a quiet, tasteful call to remember that there is supposed to be a message amid all the celebrations.
I hope it gets picked up by some papers.
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