OF FRUITCAKES, FAMILY AND FORGIVENESS

OF ALL MY FAMILY’S HOLIDAY TRADITIONS, the one I enjoy most is when my sister and I get together to bake fruitcake cookies and send them out as gifts.

Yes, you heard that right. I didn’t say fruitcakes. I said fruitcake cookies.

This is something my sister Myrna and I started doing in 1991. It started out as a way to honor the memories and baking skills of our mother, Sara Jean, and our grandmother, whom we all called Mother Petties. These women did not mess around when the time came to make a fruitcake. For them, the making of fruitcakes was a time-honored ritual that was as much art as it was a science.

Although we wanted to bake and send out fruitcakes to family and friends, my sister and I decided it would be easier to make and distribute fruitcake cookies. Perhaps it’s because we knew that in order to make a finely crafted fruitcake in a way that honored how it always made in our maternal line, the process would take not hours or days but weeks.

Allow me to explain.

The best ingredients

As a child, I observed how the process would all begin in late September when my grandmother would gather fallen pecans from the trees that grew in our backyard in Marshall, Texas. My grandfather and I knew there would be big trouble if we ate any of the pecans she was storing for the fruitcake. My grandmother would shell those pecans at night, after her day work was done. In the coming days, she would check the newspaper for coupons and sales for the best price on premium ingredients: real butter, large brown eggs, dark brown sugar and pure vanilla, not the imitation stuff. Then she’d remind my grandfather to pick up the whiskey she would need for the final step of soaking the cake.

Even though my grandmother had followed her fruitcake recipe many times, she would always find her handwritten recipe and familiarize herself with it all over again. Maybe she knew the process was methodical and that the slightest departure from the recipe would ruin the whole thing.

Next, we would make a trip to the grocery store to buy the star ingredient, the candied fruit that appears in grocery store produce departments in great abundance right around the first week in November, the aisles overflowing with colors of the soon-to-be-upon-us holiday.

Brightly colored candied fruits, glistening in sugary syrup, filled rows and rows of round, white- topped, clear, plastic containers, ranging from 4 to 16 ounces. Red and green Maraschino cherries. Yellow pineapple, dried citron, orange peel, white raisins and chopped dates, my favorite. At home all the ingredients remained out on the dining room table until baking day, which started as soon as the breakfast dishes were cleared away, my job. I happily complied because the fun was about to start.

After much measuring and mixing, the batter would be ready for the oven. For the next few hours while the fruitcake would bake low and slow, we’d all walk softly around the house so the cake wouldn’t fall.

Process and patience

Once the baking was complete, she would let the fruit-filled wonder cool and wrap it in a bourbon soaked cheesecloth, letting it marinate for weeks, the resulting fruitcake bliss, triumphantly, unveiled on Christmas Day.

Having watched my grandmother prepare fruit cakes like this year after year, I knew firsthand what an intense and intimidating process it would be for even the most experienced cooks. So we settled on the cookies.

The first time we tried it in 1991, Myrna and I baked all day. It was a somewhat truncated version of my grandmother’s process.

Indulgence

We made the cookies at the Capitol Hill condo I shared with my roommate, Jim. One problem that arose is that we made the cookies at a time in my life when I was seriously struggling with overeating and sugar addiction.

The cookies were beautiful – all six dozen of them. We each tasted them and we both agreed that they were moist and delicious. They were just the right combination of earthy, spicy, sweet and fruity.

The original plan was to store them at my place a few days until I got the shipping containers and soaked them in a little bourbon. We ate one or two more and Myrna took a few home with her in a baggy. My roommate, Jim tasted one or two. The rest? Well, I ate them all – one by sweet delicious one. That’s somewhere around 60 cookies, at 109 calories, 10 grams of sugar and 5 grams of fat apiece.

When Myrna came back a few days later to get her half of the cookies, I blamed their disappearance on my roommate. “Jim ate them,” I said, lying through my teeth in order to cover the shame of my actions. She looked so hurt, angry and disappointed.

I couldn’t believe that I let the sweetness of these cookies undermine the sweetness of our sisterhood and all that it represented. I felt such tremendous guilt. But I still kept the ugly truth to myself.

The search for a solution

A couple of months after the fruitcake cookie incident, I found myself sitting in a jam-packed meeting of Overeaters Anonymous. I was in a low, dark place that I could no longer live with. I had watched an episode of “Oprah” and learned that there was a connection between our emotions and eating. I was fascinated, to say the least. I had always felt something seriously wrong was going on with me and food. The idea that I could get a handle on this new emotional eating thing struck a chord with me. I welcomed it.

Almost overnight, I compulsively began to search for answers. I read book after book on the topic of emotional eating. “When Food is Love," “Love Hunger” and “Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child,” became my bibles. Reading these books exposed my need for professional help. So I went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings twice a week. I did psychotherapy weekly with a psychiatrist for depression and childhood trauma. I changed my diet – one of many times that I would do so – and worked out twice a day.

Dealing with all the emotions of why I was overeating was a different story. It’s too much to unpack here. But suffice it to say when you are separated from your mother at birth, when you suffer childhood sexual abuse, it can create a lot of problems that are only compounded when you turn to food to soothe the pain.

Just knowing I was an emotional eater helped. Knowing I was an addict helped. Knowing was not enough for me to get over it, though. It was a rocky road for sure.

I was finally able to get to a healthy weight, but I still struggled with overeating for years and years afterward – really all the way up until this past year, to be honest.

As I look back on all of my struggles, it is clear that I was working my way through a complicated maze of painful issues, starting in the A’s: abuse, acceptance, addiction, abandonment. I see that each of these issues are connected, one hiding behind or inside another, often disguised, one showing up as another.

Reconciliation and reflections

Of all my rock bottom moments, that fruitcake cookie day always gives me the most pause. A day that should have been joyful, instead filled me with emptiness, guilt and shame for way too many years.

It took a long time for me to finally confess to my sister that I was the one who ate her fruitcake cookies, not Jim, my roommate. But I had to do it. It’s one of the 12 steps that you take when you belong to a 12-step program, such as Overeaters Anonymous. Step No. 5 states: “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

I’m so glad that my sister forgave me. We had a big laugh and she was finally able to release all of the resentment she harbored towards Jim after I tried to pin the fruitcake cookie binge on him.

It was years before we baked Christmas cookies again. We still do it even though we’re not always in the same kitchen, as many families won’t be this Christmas due to COVID-19.

I thank God for my younger sister, Myrna. While we did not grow up in the same household, our mother cultivated and nurtured a bond that is a true treasure of my life. She is the absolute best sister in the world for me.

Christmas is a time when we often focus on the giving of gifts. But one of the best gifts you can give a person is the truth. Only then can the process of healing and forgiveness begin.