Steve Hockensmith: Naughty-Nine Tales of Christmas

As a serious, marinara-in-her-veins Italian-American, Connie had to try very hard not to be offended. She had to try even harder when she tasted it.

Bud, it appeared, hadn't done much cooking in his life. He didn't seem to know the difference between garlic powder and cumin, for instance. And ketchup and tomato sauce were considered interchangeable. Somehow, Connie kept a smile on her face even as she choked down the man's blasphemous culinary abomination.

When Bud came by a few days later with something he called a "Velveeta sausage log," Connie let him know she wasn't hungry just then but she sure was looking forward to a heaping plate later on. Over the next week, she transferred one hearty slice a day from the refrigerator to the bottom of the garbage can.

Given her earlier encounters with Bud's kitchen experiments, Connie was in no hurry to chomp into the man's first stab at cake baking. She'd always found the pleasures of fruitcake to be fickle and fleeting under the best of circumstances. A Bud Schmidt fruitcake could be dangerous.

So Connie gave the cake a place of honor amongst the cookies and biscotti and chocolate balls sent down by her relatives up north, but she never took a bite. She only mentioned the fruitcake to Bud once, fearful that he would suggest brewing up some coffee and tucking in.

"Thanks for your little surprise," she told him. "It's lovely."

Bud smiled and gave her an "Awww shucks, it was nothing" shrug. He thought she was talking about the Velveeta sausage log. Or maybe something else he'd done. His memory wasn't what it used to be. And anyway, forty-three years of marriage had taught him not to question a woman's gratitude. If it's something you earned, great. If it's not something you earned, even better.

Over the next week, the mountain of holiday treats in Connie's kitchen was gradually worn away by the erosion of near-constant snacking. Yet the fruitcake remained, inviolate, untouchable, like some moist and mysterious monolith.

It had to go.

Connie couldn't just throw it away, though. It was a symbol of Bud's devotion… though, in all likelihood, a spectacularly nasty one.

So instead of tossing it out, she dressed it up. She plated it with candy armor- gumdrops and Skittles along the sides, peppermints and candy canes on top. When she was done, the fruitcake was unrecognizable.

She covered it in Saran Wrap and walked it to the trailer of Always Sunny's most hated resident: George "Bones" Heaton, the manager. She felt a little guilty about pawning off someone else's gift as one of her own. But wasn't there an old legend that there's really only one fruitcake in the world-it just keeps getting passed around? Who was she to stand in the way of tradition?

Bones (short for "Skin and…") was a small, grizzled man with a large, fleshy mouth that spewed ill will like a smokestack. Always Sunny's residents were not, on the whole, a rowdy or unreliable bunch. So Bones spent very little of his time breaking up wild parties or overseeing evictions. Instead, his duties as manager leaned heavily toward maintenance work and general handymanery.

As undemanding as these chores generally were, however, Bones seemed bound by holy oath to make them as unpleasant as possible for all concerned. His rote response to any complaint, large or small, were the words "Whadaya want me to do about it?"

Even if you told him exactly what you wanted him to do, the odds weren't good that Bones would actually do it. Your chances for success worsened considerably if you got on his bad side somehow-which was easy to do, since his "bad side" comprised the majority of his being.

In December, there were two sure-fire ways to inspire his wrathful sloth: (A) coming to his door singing Christmas carols or (B) not coming to his door with a present. Bones had been known to chase away suddenly-not-so-merry carolers with a garden hose. Gifts, on the other hand, he accepted greedily, if not graciously.

Her new neighbors had let Connie know that a Christmas offering to Bones was mandatory. Connie was, of course, outraged and offended. But she also had cracks in her driveway and a box elder that was growing perilously close to her telephone line. So she brought Bones a gift.

"Huh," the little man grunted when he saw it. "You say there's a cake under all that candy?"

Connie came as close as she could to a good-natured laugh. "Oh, yes. It should be a tasty one, too. I had my niece Gina make it for me. She's a pastry chef up in New York. A real wiz kid with the baking. Sometimes she gets kind of fancy with the ingredients… you know, experimental. But she-"

"Yeah, okay, thanks," Bones said, signaling that Connie's audience with him was at an end. The door to his trailer was closed before she could finish her farewell "Merry Christmas!"

Later that day, Bones's wife Virgie found the fruitcake on the kitchen table when she returned from the latest meeting of her divorce support group. She'd never been divorced before. She was just trying it on for size. After four weeks with the group, she still couldn't figure out what everyone was complaining about.

"What's this?" she called out.

Bones was in the living room, approximately twelve feet away, watching Judge Judy dole out justice reality-TV style.

"What's what?" he hollered back.

"This thing with all the crap on it!"

"What?"

"This hunk of crud in the kitchen!"

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"This weird-lookin' blob on the counter!"

"That's a fruitcake!"

"A what?"

" Afrrrrruitcaaaake !"

A fruitcake? Virgie thought it looked more like a candy-encrusted brick.

"Where'd it come from?"

It took five more minutes of yelling to work out the details. Virgie never left the kitchen, and Bones never left his seat.

When it was all over, Virgie took the fruitcake to its new home. She thought the cake looked more decorative than edible, so she placed it amongst the snow globes, nutcrackers and miniature angels on the mantelpiece of the double-wide trailer's faux fireplace. There it stayed for the next twelve months.

Virgie and Bones usually packed up their Christmas decorations around Valentine's Day or, at the very latest, Easter. But this year it became a one-man job-and the man in question was reluctant to commit to any project that required him to put down the remote control.

When Virgie left Bones, she chose the timing carefully. She didn't want a big fuss. So she started packing her bags five seconds after the kick-off of the Super Bowl. She was out of the trailer by half-time. Bones tracked her down the next day to attempt a reconciliation-over the phone.

"Awww, you don't care if I'm there or not, George," Virgie told him. "I bet you didn't even stop watching the game after I left last night."

"Well, yeah," Bones admitted sheepishly. On the widescreen TV a few feet before him, Judge Judy was scolding a man for selling his best friend a sickly parrot. "But I didn't enjoy it."

The reconciliation did not take root, and Bones found himself single for the first time in fifteen years. It didn't really affect his life much, except that there was a lot less shouting around the trailer and no more bickering about what to watch on TV.

The following November, Bones's bachelorhood produced an unexpected dividend. Through no effort of his own, the man suddenly found himself with an admirer.

Ethel Queenan began dropping by every day with food.

"That wife of yours never fed you right," she'd say as she handed him the latest creation from the pages of her new cookbook: Bake Until Bubbly!. "And now that she's gone, you're just wasting away to nothing."