Fruitcake Toss Day

What the day is

Fruitcake Toss Day is observed on January 3, once the holidays are over and the fruitcake is still there. The best-known version is an organized event in Manitou Springs, Colorado, where competitors launch fruitcakes by catapult, slingshot and compressed air for distance.

Origin and background

The joke depends on fruitcake being indestructible, and it genuinely nearly is. The cake is packed with dried fruit and sugar and often soaked in spirits, which leaves very little free water available for microbes. That is the same principle behind jam and cured meat, and it means a well-made fruitcake is not merely long-lasting by accident. Keeping was the entire purpose.

That purpose made it valuable. Candied fruit was expensive, sugar was a luxury, and a cake that survived months was worth making deliberately for a wedding or a winter. The recipe descends from spiced fruit breads that go back to the Roman period and spread once colonial sugar made preserved fruit affordable.

The durability claims are not exaggerated. A fruitcake baked in Michigan in 1878 has been kept by the same family ever since as an heirloom. Conservators working on the huts left by British Antarctic expeditions recovered a fruitcake more than a century old, still in its tin, and described it as being in remarkable condition and very nearly edible.

The reputation problem belongs to a specific product rather than the category: the mass-market version built on fluorescent candied peel. A genuine fruitcake, made with good dried fruit and fed with spirits over several weeks, is a different thing entirely and is the reason the tradition existed.

How to take part

• Try a properly made one before condemning the whole category.
• Toss the bad one, ideally competitively and outdoors.
• Do not throw food at anybody, which is the one rule these events enforce.
• Feed a homemade cake with a spoonful of spirits every week if you make one next year.
• Look up the Antarctic fruitcake, which is a genuinely startling object.