Commentary - Eve Fairbanks: Believe it or not, fruitcake can actually taste good

Older people hate it because their kids don’t come home as often as they should. Middle-aged people hate it because of the financially crushing, depression-inducing stress of gift-buying and card-sending.

Twenty-somethings hate it because it’s kitschy and uncool: The general hipster love of kitsch does not extend to mistletoe sweaters and electronic brooches that sing “Jingle Bells” when you touch them.

An entire youth pop-culture phenomenon — David Sedaris — was built around mocking the misery of being employed as a shopping-mall elf. The sole segment of the population that seems to love Christmas in proportion to its hype is children, and only because they’re told a fat lie about it and its jolly patron from the North Pole.

But here’s another strange thing: Most of the Jewish people I know really like Christmas. There is no inner torment over the Virgin Birth’s commercialization. There is no guilt over the decision to display plastic reindeer and an inflatable Charlie Brown rather than a more reverent crèche on one’s front lawn. There is no — or at least greatly reduced — gift-giving angst, as Hannukah pretty much exists only to make kids feel less left out around Christmas, and most adults make a friendly bargain among themselves to forget about it.

Freed from these burdens, then, many of us are — ironically — able to see Christmas for its true joy and merriness. Candy canes are delicious. So are those panettone cakes from Italy, with lemon zest and butter.

Christmas lights make a street look much, much lovelier; college students recognize this, by festooning their dorm rooms with them. “Miracle on 34th Street” is a great movie. As a Jewish friend put it, every child actor wants to be Natalie Wood’s 8-year-old Susan.

More seriously, Christmas gives a look-forward-to-it structure to winter, a season that would otherwise be hopelessly drab. In autumn, Halloween and Thanksgiving make pumpkins, vampires, hayrides, and turkey with cranberry sauce fall trademarks, and make the season fun.

Without these holidays that hitch their particular colors and sounds to our impressions of autumn, we’d be left, between August and November, with a vague whiff of harvest celebrations, a road trip or two down Skyline Drive, and a general feeling of melancholy brought on by the increasing cold and tree death.

Without the capacity for Christmas to become synonymous with winter in our minds, I posit that tinsel, sugar cookies, mulled wine, pine trees, peppermint, stupid furry hats, gingerbread, singing in a drunken group at strangers’ doorsteps, candles, snow angels, mulled wine and kissing people at the behest of a plant would not have wintry connotations for us.

Maybe Christmas is just an excuse for all these things, a pretext for a national Saturnalia; but it’s a necessary one, a holiday whose traditions add texture to the season. Is anyone’s favorite part of winter January? No. That dismal month embodies what winter would be without Christmas: A few cups of hot chocolate, a ski in Tahoe if you can afford it and sleet.

Many of the complaints lodged by anti-Christmas types relate to the holiday’s dispiriting, commercialized sameness; how, starting after Thanksgiving, you hear the same Irving Berlin “White Christmas” clip whether you’re in a fetish shop or a Marvelous Market.

To my mind, this sameness gives the holiday season a nice sense of unity: Aren’t we supposed to be healing these days from our national divisiveness? So I invite you to let the scales fall from your eyes and, with your own money, try buying a fruitcake for your own consumption.

I’ve done it, and have found that fruitcake can actually be good, despite its decided lack of cultural cache. Even Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant, realized that embracing the Christmas spirit could change his life.

Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.