The McCollumn - 12/2: 'People actually eat that stuff?"

As I went inside to pay for my gas Wednesday at Hal Smith’s Big Cat station, I couldn’t help but notice a strange multi-colored, plastic-wrapped log near the pen jar by the register.

“Seriously?” I asked the cashier staff in an incredulous tone. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope, they’re for real.”

Indeed, they were.

Old Fashion Claxton Fruit Cake, there for the discerning gas station gourmet.

“And people actually buy these and eat them?” I asked, fearing what the answer might be.

“Oh yeah. Mr. Hal eats them.”

My head began to hurt. I began to immediately question Ms. Carol Smith, Hal’s wife, as to the veracity of the earlier statement.

“He eats them,” she said, matter-of-factly.

When questioned if she herself indulged in the candied fruit laced baked goods, she demurred.

“He eats them,” she repeated. “I don’t.”

Perhaps there was sanity in the world after all.

I don’t like fruitcake.

Never have, never will.

I don’t wish to demean the good people of Claxton, Ga., or their product, which has existed much longer than I have on this planet, but I’m almost certain this year’s batch will long outlast them, me and possibly a nuclear winter.

I could be a victim of years of holiday programming in television and films, where fruitcake is almost universally panned as either inedible or as unwanted as plague rats.

Al Gore’s great bastion of knowledge, the Internet, informed me beloved television icon Johnny Carson might be the source of all fruitcake hate, with his Tonight Show quip from Dec. 1985:

“There’s only one fruitcake in the world, and people keep passing it on.”

I’ve always been of a particularly singular opinion when it comes to the fusion of fruit and cake: avoid at all costs, especially if the “fruit” looks like Jujubes.

Fruitcakes aren’t exactly designed to be aesthetically pleasing either.

They often come shaped more like bricks than cakes.

(I admit it’s a subtle distinction, but to provide a frame of reference, I don’t get the impression I could use a normal cake to build a fortified dwelling. I do get that impression from almost every fruitcake I’ve seen.)

Maybe I’m wrong on this one.

Perhaps one of you noble women of Opelika has a recipe that will set me right and make me turn from my heathen, anti-fruitcake ways.

You are more than welcome to try and set me right, even if it takes you baking one and bringing it by for us to try up here at the office.

(I’m willing to make that sacrifice.)

Just know that I’d much prefer a glass of egg nog — the seasonal delight that should be here all year.