Fruitcakes Already (of an addictively almondy sort)

and some unconventional ways to start cultivating the holiday spirit right now

Fruitcakes are in the oven as I write and, let me tell you, what an Olympic-level culinary feat! Truly, you need muscle to lift those bowls of dense batter and candied fruits, to whip egg whites and fold them in, then, with the arm strength of a backhoe, scoop the resulting heaps of bejeweled batter into baking pans. And that’s just one Christmas cake. Imagine all the other stuff that will be coming out of people’s ovens over the next five weeks in preparation for the holidays: star-shaped cookies, pistachio-studded terrines, gravlax, lobster bisques, chocolate yule logs, and on and on until it’s turkey time. That’s not even mentioning all the decking of the halls to come, the stringing of lights, the shopping... I do marvel at how my American friends manage to insert Thanksgiving into the middle of all this.

While we’re in the kitchen, what are the top three holiday recipes in your house (for Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate) that you must produce every year at this time to avoid a mutiny? Here, it’s fruitcakes, shortbread cookies, and, weirdly, Greek Easter Bread, even though nobody here is Greek and it’s certainly not Easter.

Perking up, as I have been lately, to the reality of just how much care and effort go into things like Christmas, the word “diligence” comes to mind. Actually, it was already on my mind for a few reasons unrelated to holidays. For one, I just finished reading a little book called A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind, which somehow went under my radar when it was released back in 2018. It was written by a Japanese Buddhist monk, who explains how decluttering, cleaning, and tidying are central to a monk’s daily life (and, no, they didn’t get the age-old idea from Marie Kondo), not because of dirty surroundings, but because cleaning is linked to “cultivating the mind,” and done as much “to eliminate the gloom in our hearts,” as anything else.

Here’s a little bit from the intro:

Life is a daily training ground, and we are each composed of the very actions we take in life. If you live carelessly, your mind will be soiled, but if you try to live conscientiously, it will slowly become pure again. If your heart is pure, the world looks brighter. If your world is bright, you can be kinder to others.

And so, the monks clean and polish absolutely everything (including themselves) diligently, every day, as if each thing were a mirror reflecting their very soul. Admirable. But you’re wondering what this has to do with fruitcakes…