The Christmas Fruitcake: Ways to Recycle Your Unwanted Fruitcake

Ahhh Christmas is almost upon us. That means merry, mirth, friends and family along with the dreaded unwanted fruitcake. By now everyone has heard at least one fruitcake joke in their lifetime, if not more. But even in spite of the amusement these jokes bring, the one big problem remains: What do you DO with this unwanted food? After much thought and time, I came up with several ways to re-use this dastardly food in order to make it somehow useful.

Door stops

Some have those doorstop dogs. Some have those little triangular wedges that with luck fit under a door, otherwise they are useless. What more festive way to decorate the house for yultide and even new years than to toss a fruitcake in the doorstops place? It's colorful, heavy and definitely will even keep the rodents and other animals away because of it's natural ability to repel anything from being attracted to it within a 10 foot radius. Even better, if you have a dog, it also acts as a perfect chewtoy to keep fido on duty guarding your door. What better purpose could a fruitcake have than to be a doorstop AND lifesaver?

Bookends

Bookends are still very special items to have. Most times it's hard finding matching ones, as a lot of the ones I've seen personally in bookstores are contrasting ends for whatever series of books they are intended to be used on. However, say you want colorful AND matching? what better purpose for fruitcake? Seriously. While they may not match exactly perfect, they sure can come close. Not only are they colorful but not to the point of annoying, they also are heavy, which every book owner knows makes them perfect AS bookends.

Paper Weight

This is a given, if you really take the time to consider the weight of a fruitcake and size. To be straight-forward, they're extremely heavy. This could be in part to the size and number of ingredients or perhaps that concrete compound that has to be used in order to make it stick (and last) so well. It can decorate an office for a while and give your standard glass paperweight a well deserved vacation to be polished up and looking brand new again. Atop this, if you're brave enough, you can get holes drilled into it and it can be a multi-purpose weight, too, going so far as to hold pens and markers if you needed it to.

Over-sized Legos

Now with improved sticky-ness. These blocks of fruity goodness (or should I say bad-ness?) can adhere to anything they're left on. Why not collect a few of these from family members and let your kids build bigger houses with them - leaving their real legos for the people building. That way they surely don't run out. Also, if the cake is big enough it can replace that all-too-small lego base that some sets come with. That way the kids can guarantee space (or more!) to build on. If you only have one of those bases but more than one kid, problem solved. Each child gets a fruitcake to use as a base instead of the bickering. Not only that, it also blends perfectly with every color of the legos included most of the time. Especially, as I have seen, with red and yellow.

Animal Attractor

Do you have a problem with your faithful feline getting up on counters like I do? Then try this neat trick. Cats are known for either being picky or eating anything in sight. Mine does the latter and this actually works. Say you don't have a small kennel for kitty to go into but you have to leave something important out on the counter for a few minutes. Say you have your turkey out and forgot to get the baster out beforehand. Leave a fruitcake on the floor in kitty's food dish. This is guaranteed to keep that cat occupied for a few minutes if not longer as he, or she, attempts miserably to eat through the oh-so-sticky cake. Giving kitty the fruitcake also means not weighing down your garbage bag later. Who doesn't love an all natural trash disposal system? Kitty's perfect - not only for fruitcake, but all of those pesky leftovers and foods nobody wants.

Boot Scraper

This last idea doesn't tend to last long and does tend to be kind of messy if the wrong kind of boot is rubbed on it. But then, again, as long as you don't track snow into the house I doubt anybody would mind. If it's anything like most of my family's homes, we remove our shoes and boots at the door anyway. So that area is bound to be a little mussed here and there with snow. This one hasn't been tested personally by me yet, as we haven't had an ounce of snow to test it on. But perhaps it would last a little longer than you think - given that you scrape ONLY snow upon it and act somewhat gentle with it. Give it a try, at any rate. Worst case scenario is you toss a few crumbs out to the birds. Lucky them.

Look around the house. There are tons of uses for those pesky fruitcakes. Some are plain easy when you look about, some take a little constructive thinking. At least you know that when the holiday is over and whichever family member that gave it inquires, 'How was the fruitcake?' you can honestly reply, "It was delightful, thanks!" And nobody will ever know. Seasons Greetings!