The Twenty-Four Days of Christmas: Day Thirteen

Catching Up: Budgeting and Shopping

Let's get a little caught up here, since I am a little behind!

Day thirteen.  By this point I had heard "How is your Christmas shopping going?" so many times that I was beginning to become a little intimidated and second-guess my determination to make this a (mostly) home-made Christmas.  So I sat down and did some budget work.  Hmm.  Not a ton of extra cash to throw around this year.  So the next step was to talk to my local ebay guru and learn the basics of how to do some ebay selling.  These wound up a bit better than I had hoped.  Now what to do?

Stay tuned for: list-making (the phrase that makes the gentlemen in my home cower in fear!)

The other part of Day Thirteen was to permit Mr. Marvelous to go into the spare refrigerator and get the first fruitcake that I had made a couple of weeks ago and have his first slice.  No fruitcake jokes please; I know them all (I even wrote some of them!)  But really, MY fruitcakes are better than most.  In spite of what my niece Anne would tell you.  Really.

Here's my funny fruitcake story.  My mother in law had a looooong tradition of making these for her family every year.  Soon after I joined the family my father in law was diagnosed with Type II diabetes.  Now with two diabetics in the family, my poor mother in law HAD to find a recipe that diabetics could eat.  So she did.  It was OK, but the normal kind was better (and please keep your, "That's-not-saying-much" comments to yourselves!).  Several years after she died, my husband started mentioning that he really missed his Christmas fruitcake.  So I began my search.  I had a lot of her old recipes and I looked through those, but the only thing I could find was the "Light Fruitcake" recipe.  Assuming this was the one she had made for the family diabetics, I kept searching, and kept coming up with nothing.  Finally, a couple of years after beginning this "fruitless" search, I looked at the "Light" Fruitcake recipe again and suddenly realized that it was not "Lite" fruitcake (calorie-wise) but "Light" Fruitcake, as opposed to "Dark" Fruitcake.  Duh!  I have successfully made this every year since, and Mr. Marvelous is happy.  If you are interested let me know and I will be happy to post the recipe.