What People Were Eating On Christmas The Year You Were Born

Fruitcake, a dense and sticky cake packed with sugar, soaked with liquor and studded with gummy fruit, came about in a simpler form in Europe during the Middle Ages. It became popular in the United States by the end of the 19th century, so quintessentially Christmas by the mid-1900s that you could get mail-order fruitcakes to send to everyone you knew as gifts. Perhaps that's when it jumped the shark. During the '60s, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson famously remarked, "The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake…There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year." The cracks continued, and the national attitude toward fruitcake seemed officially shifted from nostalgic love to mockery by 1989, when Carson ran a sketch about a fruitcake not being to be cut by even construction equipment.