Dec 6 2021 - Christmas Cake vs Wedding Cake

 

Christmas Cake. Wedding Cake.  How did it come about that they are dense, dark, 'matured' fruit cakes with marzipan and royal icing? This is a Commonwealth tradition.  What will Barbados do now? So Christmas cake is the same as Wedding cake to me.   And then there is Christmas pudding - rich, steamed pudding made with flour, suet and dried fruits.  What is the common element of both of these English Christmas traditions?  Rich! Very rich. And what about the French Buche de Noel?  Now that's a traditional French sponge cake layered with a rich, butter cream frosting, all made to resemble a decorative Yule log.   The Italians have much lighter and less sweet Pandora and Panettone Christmas breads.  They fall for the fruit cake trap too and have Panforte - a traditional Italian rich nut and fruit cake. Everyone seems to fall for the marinated mature fruits as part of their Christmas cake tradition.  You can tour around the world in Christmas cakes HERE.   And how does Johnny Carson fit into the Christmas tradition? With his famous fruitcake joke.  “The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.” The article says that "For many, that wisecrack sliced like a hot knife through soft butter. Almost immediately after the jokes airing, fruitcake sales drastically declined." Today's picture is from a few years ago - a colourized lily - the impossible blue.

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The Oldest Joke

There are so many traditions this time of year - including Christmas crackers with their tired old jokes.  This got me thinking about old jokes and I wondered what is the oldest joke.  Of course there's an answer available in a flash.  The oldest joke was recorded around 1900 BC and is a lowbrow Sumerian toilet joke.  Here it is: 'Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap' A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second -- “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” These two oldest jokes are ok.  However, I refrain from spreading any more ancient jokes given how crude they are.  And then they aren't very funny.  Just as well, then, that Christmas cracker jokes are only old and not ancient.  Christmas crackers  were first made in Victorian times in the early 1850's.  A London confectioner invented them when he added a motto to his sugared almond bonbons.  These were sold wrapped in a twisted paper package - and he got the idea of adding a 'bang'. This turned out to be a hit and a successful business.   The paper crown was added by his sons in the early 1900s. By the end of the 1930's love poems were replaced by jokes or limericks.  And so our tired old jokes probably come from the vaudeville era of jokes.  I found a few more Christmas jokes from the U.K.  The brussels sprouts joke was voted the funniest joke last year in Britain.  How will Christmas dinner be different after Brexit? No Brussels. What do workers at Sports Direct get for Christmas dinner? About 5 minutes. What do you get if you cross Donald Trump with a Christmas Carol? O Comb Over Ye Faithful.

That Elusive Blue in Flowers

What makes blue so beautiful... This is what I think of as a traditional, species lily.  It it a tall plant for the garden.  It has the traditional orange colour with dark spots, the pendant flowers with recurved petals and the delicate hanging, suspended stamens.  This stem in the picture is a Ontario Regional Lily Society show winner from a few years ago, so it is perfection as this lily goes.  I think it is a Lilium Pardalinum.   This is the second in the series on Blue Lilies, the elusive colour that is missing in the genes of lilies.