Fruitcake!

As we often do at the mystery book club I attend, we did a "Chinese gift exchange."  If you do not know what this is, it is very interesting.  The participants draw numbers equal to the number of gifts being exchanged.  From there you set your own rules, pretty much.

The first person chooses a gift.  The second person can choose a gift, including the first person's gift.  So then the first person would get to choose another gift.  The third person can take a gift already chosen, or choose a new gift, and so on.  Sometimes when people do this, they put a limit on how many times a gift can be chosen after the original chooser.  Sometimes, there is no limit.

The bottom line is everyone gets to choose a gift, and everyone leaves with a gift.

This can get interesting and even a little vindictive when you have a group of personalities that do not always get along. Then, you have people taking gifts for spite not because they like the gift. I think that the people in the book club are very polite and considerate, mostly because we only see each other as a whole once a month, although some of the members do have other relationships with each other. So, there was not much taking of others' gifts. 

My turn was midway through the selections, and I took a tall package bag with a reindeer face on it.  Because I liked the bag. It contained a fruitcake!  Well, I am one of those weird people who likes fruit cake.  And the people sitting next to me asked me if I did. (There were 9 of us present, and including myself, 3 liked fruitcake.)  After the gift exchange was done, the person to my left said she almost took the fruitcake when it was her turn, but decided not to, since she was the person who brought it (there was no rule against that, I have seen it done before.) She told me it came from United Supermarkets, a local supermarket chain http://www.unitedtexas.com/ (recently purchased by Albertsons.)

The book club was Thursday night.  The next morning I decided (was salivating at the thought) to have a piece of fruitcake for a snack at work.  I opened the package to cut a slice, and the aroma of rum struck me first thing.  I understand that the alcohol "cooks off" but decided it was probably not appropriate to bring something to work that smelled so strongly of rum.

This cake is wonderful: moist, lots of candied fruit, lots of nuts.  Hmmm. And, here it is Sunday night, and every time I open the package, the aroma of rum still wafts out!  This is a great fruitcake!