@TomH You forgot to add “tasting” the scotch between adding the ingredients! 
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My great aunt Marie made fruit cakes for Christmas. I don’t know what all went into them, but they were loaded with a proprietary (secret) variety of spirits. Everyone looked forward to Marie’s cake. The recipe died with her.
My brothers in law is married to an Irish woman. The wedding cake, fruit cake, was baked and decorated by Eileen and her mother. Traditional is adding poteen illegal white liquor. Mum keep a jar labeled Holy water.
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My great grandma would send each household in our family a tin of fruitcake every Christmas. It wasn’t homemade, but ordered from Collin Street Bakery. Only some family members liked it, so it always lasted quite a while.
The first Christmas after she died, we thought we were done with fruitcake, but lo and behold, each family received a fruitcake in the post. Turns out she’d pre-ordered them and we had no way of knowing when the fruit cake deliveries from beyond would end.
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I think this is the fruitcake from Hell. It has no soul and is probably the cause of most of the fruit cake jokes and hatred.
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Those of us who don’t like fruitcake said these fruitcakes must have been sent by her from hell.
Those who liked it were sure she was sending them from heaven.
(my family has a pretty weird sense of humor, so when we discussed whether the fruitcakes had came from heaven or hell, it wasn’t seen as being at all disrespectful to my great grandma, it was just a hilarious debate that we knew she would have enjoyed)
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Of course it is my opinion that the Colin St, fruitcakes are from Hell. It is true some like them but they are just too hard shell Southern Baptist (no spirits) for my Catholic taste. Maybe if the cake was taken to a bar. 
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I am not a big fan of fruitcake, but I do like the German version. (Hi @Finn!)
It’s more like a bread, but has the fruit pieces added. But less of the candied stuff and more raisin stuff.
It’s called Stollen or Christstollen.
I don’t have any handy, but this is an image grab from Google. Check it out sometime if you are interested in trying a different version.
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Funny the twists and turns these threads take. From Thanksgiving to fruitcakes.
I read a substack from a history professor and she wrote a short piece on the history of this particular Thanksgiving holiday which is interesting – Our first Thanksgiving of the 4th Thursday in November was in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War. I’ve reprinted her post below fyi.
In any event, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Heather Cox Richardson 11/23/2022
Thanksgiving itself came from a time of violence: the Civil War.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book , to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation.
They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming.
And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And they won.
My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2022.
—
Notes:
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I grew up with Stollen as a highlight of our holiday gatherings every Christmas season. My grandfather was a German baker (in East Orange NJ) who unfortunately was deceased by the time I was born so I never got to try his Stollen. My father and uncle passed along the Stollen tradition to the next generation. It’s definitely an east coast thing, I have not found fresh baked Stollen here in Seattle.
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Yummy! Stollen! We definitely have our share of Stollen here in Germany around this time of year.
But the highlight for us at Christmas time is Strieble, funnel cake, at the Advent and Christmas markets. Here’s the one I devoured at our town’s Christmas market this weekend.
Skipping ahead a few seasons and back on the subject of fruitcake, I’m a big fan of Osterbrot (Easter bread). It’s a light bread (almost like a dense brioche) with dried fruit inside and sprinkled with rock sugar. Delicious. Here’s a screenshot of one that’s similar to what we get.
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My daughter sends me one or two stollen every year from Germany. I love it that much.
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I miss the Christmas markets and the gluwine.
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@ClaudnDaye We went to Germany several years back for Christmas at the Garmisch Armed Forces Rec Center) while my daughter was stationed in Romania (Foreign Service with State). Toured several of the Christmas markets, enjoyed gluhwein and sausages (real ones, not the stuff they serve most places here in the US) while standing in the snow. What a treat that was!
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