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At this very moment there should be a large package flying across Canada filled to the brim with my Christmas treats.
Just thinking about this makes me glow with a holiday cheer. Somebody out there loves me a lot and feels the need to spoil me every year. (And I won’t bring up the fact that there were more presents for my boyfriend in last year’s parcel... because that would just be petty, wouldn’t it?)
Anyway, each year before this package makes its way from Toronto to Whistler I ask my mom not to send me a homemade Christmas fruitcake. Every year she ignores me. She orders the cake weeks before Christmas from the baker at the Farmer’s Market and then packages it up and sends it on its way. I’m sure the fruitcake accounts for about 80 per cent of the package’s weight. I keep telling her to think of all the presents that could be stuffed in the box if she left the fruitcake out.
But not even the recent threat of the airlines banning fruitcakes from carry on bags (in case there was a weapon hidden inside) would stop my mom. She would find a way to get me a fruitcake on Christmas if it killed her, and I in return would find a way to pawn it off on unsuspecting guests over the holidays.
It’s tradition. And well, that’s all there is to it.
If I could prove there were some hidden trans fats in the Christmas fruitcake, rather than a sharp blade, I might just have a case for myself.
Trans fats have become my mom’s nemesis, like Harry Potter’s Voldemort or Luke Skywalker’s Darth Vader.
She is fanning the flames of hysteria about trans fats and willing to wax eloquent about the matter to anyone who’ll listen. I’ve gotta tell ya, it’s sucks calling home these days.
The recent Globe and Mail article entitled "Trans fats almost everywhere, tests find" has taken her hysteria to a fever pitch.
Did you know that one gram of trans fat consumed daily over 10-15 years can increase your risk of heart disease by about 20 per cent, she demanded last week?
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, my dad’s absolute favourite meal at the Red Lobster has 22 grams of trans fat, according to this article in the Globe.
Well if we ever wondered why dad needed a quintuple bypass last year, we need wonder no more.
It’s because of this bypass, and the fact that his arteries were clogged up so badly, that mom has taken to finding the hidden trans fats in food as her personal mission in life.
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