This was the first year we had to celebrate the holidays without Dad here, but Christmas came just in time for K’s Cousin and his wife to return to Alaska. They kindly met us partway in Anchorage, and we spent Christmas together there. We spent the two nights hanging out and just spending time with each other, it’s been years since we’ve gotten to really hang out. We soaked in our hot tubs, swam in our pools, found an open bar to drink at for a while, and had dinner at Sullivan’s, which was the only non-Asian restaurant open. It was a lovely if unusual holiday and a welcome distraction to the sadness of dad being out of state. Really however that isn’t the reason for this post, cake is.

The day before Christmas eve I decided I wanted to try a new recipe, it was basically a fruitcake with some fresh pineapple tossed in a cake that was a bit like a pound cake. It was really good…too bad, I didn’t notice the fact that the recipe called for it to make 3 bread pan-sized loaves. WTF?! Three? In the end, I only made two because the writer of the recipe was using a size I not only didn’t have but frankly I can’t say I’ve seen, but it was two sizable loaves.

What do you do when you have two large loaves of cake the day before you head out to a hotel for two nights?! If you are me you think about all the people who had to be working for you to spend Christmas in a hotel, and how a number of those people would be working when they didn’t want to be. So I hacked that cake into as many slices as I could, wrapped them in plastic wrap and brought them in with me, and I am very glad I did so.

I’ve had to work many a holiday I didn’t want to work, I know how much it sucks. Who cares how much money you are making when you would rather be with your loved ones? Not to mention that if you don’t have kids, you always end up working it, either because management makes you, or because you can’t bare to make someone work when they have kids.

I handed out a little bit of cake on Christmas eve, mainly to hotel workers, but mostly I handed it out to anyone I had direct contact with on Christmas. Not everyone likes fruitcake, and I didn’t want people to either not want to eat it or to toss it, so, for the most part, I said it was cake, with fruit in it.

Over and over again I approached someone, passed over some cake and said: “It’s basically cake, with fruit in it.” I felt silly, but whatever. What I found was that just about everyone I handed a piece to said: “I love fruit cake”…So I repeated “cake, with fruit in it” unnecessarily. Ah well. LOL

But that simple piece of plastic-wrapped “cake with fruit in it” made people so happy. I explained why I was doing it, and everyone seemed so happy to have someone recognize that they were working on a holiday they would rather not be working, and to reward them for that. Toward the end of the night K, who was happy to let me do my thing, but wasn’t into it the same way, was somewhat excitedly asking if I had any more cake with me when we came across someone new. He got into it.

It was totally worth baking the unexpectedly huge batch of cake and the effort it took to cut, wrap and hand it out. I’m glad I could cheer up the holiday for so many people. I know I would have been thrilled had anyone done that to me.