It’s an old story whose flavor gets better with the telling, just as fruitcake improves with age.
In 1968 in Nepal, nobody knew it was Christmas time except the few of us foreigners. The big holiday celebrated here is Desai, back in October, with lights on rooftops and windows, huge tall swings hung from branches, hand-made-foot-operated Ferris wheels, dancing and exchanging gifts of festival foods - slightly sweet sel-roti and crunchy, smoky flavored chewra.
My sister and brother had arrived in early December, home from their first semester in boarding school. Judy went to explore the bazaar with Mom. In our dusty, provincial market, a woman selling foodstuffs and various sundries saw them shopping and called out that she had the most wonderful treasure from far away. The vendor's enthusiasm for her stash of rock-hard, pale, dirty-looking dried dates sparked an idea in my sister's head. She bargained for the gems, then pulled out the cookbook GramB had bequeathed her when she left for the other side of the world.
After that first Christmas fruitcake (featuring mainly, you guessed it, dates), a tradition grew. Starting in August when she first got back to boarding school in India, my sister would portion out her monthly pocket money (she had to buy her own shampoo and toothpaste, too) and hunt for ingredients. She bought black and golden raisins (called kismis), cashews, sometimes even almonds, goodies from Kashmir and further west - food of Persian and Moghul kings and queens - and stored them safely in her trunk until Going Down Day.
Going home was days of travel by train, rickshaw, bus, or jeep, and walking. At home, she learned where to go in our little bazaar for ghur, fresh-milled flour, and walnuts. What is ghur called in English? There really isn't a translation - it's partway along the process of sugar cane juice becoming sugar. Think of not-quite "jaggery". We didn't have brown sugar in the village in those days, so she improvised. Over the years she researched and shared recipes to make candied orange peel and pickled watermelon rind to add to the recipe.
From the kismis we picked out stems, ant and bee bodies, rocks, and clay clods that got swept up off the clean, sun-soaked roof top in Kashmir where those grapes became raisins. I remember helping to pick through the raisins with my little kid fingers. The bigger people all helped crack thick-shelled walnuts and almonds to get the meats out, working around the dining table by lamplight after dinner. I didn't even like fruitcake at the time, but I loved helping my big sister clean the raisins and stir the ghur on the top of the kerosene-gas stove. There were sticks of straw and other sweet-loving creatures to pick out of that too, as I stirred.
We put up a homemade Swedish Christmas tree with three branches - we now affectionately refer to it as the Charlie Brown tree. There were handmade decorations, and our gifts were simple. That first year in Pokhara, we had some gifts that arrived in packages from the States in various states of wholeness, but in later years we made gifts for each other: stitched shirts, painted pictures, handmade wooden boxes, warm cable-knit sweaters. They were made with love and care because we couldn't always get what you thought you needed in Pokhara in those days. We usually took down a puzzle from the shelf in the attic and kept it on the table for everyone to work on.
From a handful of hard, dry dates discovered in the Pokhara bazaar in 1968, Judy's gift grew to making and giving away four, then six, then more fruitcakes at Christmastime. After she graduated from high school and settled back in the States for college (where she bought all the ingredients at the supermarket), she mailed 20-some fruitcakes in time for Christmas to family and other loved ones. Many years later she passed on the tradition to my daughter Clara, where the time-tested recipe has morphed into a yummy gluten-free version as Grampa Bob eats GF ("Grampa Friendly"). It still gets sent around the country to people we love, in time for the holidays -- even in 2020 with COVID mail!
