Nutty As A Fruit Cake
I'm defending my inflatable fruitcake while unpacking why Canada never got the memo that fruitcake is supposed to be a punchline. Featuring two-story cakes that made diplomatic diary history, prairie tests that involve holding slices up to windows, and the surprisingly thin line between a hockey puck and a properly aged Christmas brick.
To honour National Fruitcake Day, this inflatable fruitcake has come out of hiding. No crumbs. No crumbs. Not edible. Zero pressure.
I do have visions of sugar plums dancing in my head. Or wait, that’s my mom’s Christmas fruitcake. Dense, dark, and boozy enough to make the relatives ask for thirds.
If you grew up with a Christmas cake story (didn't we all?) like that, you’ll recognize the feeling. Every family has one.
So yeah, thinking about that makes me a little nutty. Which, as it turns out, is exactly how fruitcake got its reputation.
Here’s the thing about “nutty as a fruitcake.”
The phrase went viral in the 1950s, when mail-order factories started cranking out what I’d call Christmas-flavoured bricks. Fruitcake used to be royalty: brandy-soaked fruit and nuts aging for months. But the cheap versions? Those mystery nuggets that may have once seen a fruit from across the factory floor.
So “nutty as a fruitcake” became a dig at two things: the literal mountain of nuts in the good versions, and the idea that anyone who’d willingly eat the cheap stuff must be certifiably bonkers. Johnny Carson buried it for good in 1978 with his “there’s only one fruitcake in the world” joke, turning it into an instant punchline.
But Canada never got that memo.
Up here, we kept making it properly. Our version, gâteau aux fruits in Quebec, is dark, moist, and serious business.
On the prairies, you’d start it in November when the first real cold hit, wrapping it in brandy-soaked cheesecloth like you were tucking in babies for a long winter’s nap. My mom’s was so dense you could see light through a thin slice like stained glass. That’s the prairie test. If you can’t see sunshine through your fruitcake, you’re doing it wrong.
And here’s the killer fact: William Lyon Mackenzie King, our longest-serving Prime Minister and a man who talked to his dead mother through séances, once received a two-storey fruitcake as an Easter gift in 1948. He wrote about it in his diary like it was a diplomatic achievement. Parks Canada still has the recipe from his Woodside estate, and apparently even fruitcake haters like that one.
Also worth noting: fruitcakes and hockey pucks are both black, both dent car doors, and both have been launched across Manitoba. One on ice. One by Boeing engineers in Colorado who were definitely Canadian snowbirds.
CBC Radio once jokingly tried to outlaw fruitcake. Even Canada briefly considered banning its own creation.
So this December 27th? Eat the good stuff. Mock the bad stuff. Inflate the weird stuff. And if your aunt brings her “famous” cake from 2003, smile, nod, and remember: we’re all a little nutty. Some of us just hide it better.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an inflatable fruitcake to defend. It’s the only thing in our house nobody’s tried to regift or launch across a football field.
