Like a formal dinner, the entire holiday season is made up of many traditional, interlaced ingredients. This Brave New Holiday however, two of those ingredients — air travel and fruitcakes — will not be mixing, particularly if you’re flying to Canada. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority has declared that fruitcakes are not welcome as carry-ons because they are notoriously difficult to identify on X-ray scanners.
While this may seem somewhat silly on surface, there is some logic to this rule. After all, somebody could hide a nail clipper in a fruitcake — nobody would be laughing then.
Fruitcakes are notoriously dense confections, so much so that Lois Lane once saved Superman’s life by stuffing a piece of kryptonite into a fruitcake. OK, that didn’t actually happen, but it could have. Which is also President Bush’s new line of reasoning regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, at least based on this December 16 exchange between Bush and Diane Sawyer on the ABC News program Primetime:
DIANE SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons. . . .
PRESIDENT BUSH: So what’s the difference?
So apparently America’s new standard for pre-emptive incursion is, “We heard from this guy we met at a bar who used to go out with this girl that overheard her roommate tell the cabdriver about her cousin who actually liked fruitcakes.” Diplomacy, nuclear Armageddon… what’s the difference?
Another traditional component of the holidays is the singing of Christmas carols. I especially like some of the Brave New Carols that have been circulating this year. Most people’s favorite seems to have been “The 12 Brave New Days of Christmas”: On the twelfth day of Christmas, My true love sent to me: Twelve months of lying, Eleven no-bid contracts, Ten chicken-hawk imperialists, Nine Supreme Court justices, Eight enemy combatants, Seven Osama videos, Six Fox News apologists, Five WMDs, Four militant Muslims, Three French vetoes, Two Canadian fruitcakes, and Saddam in a spider hole.
This article appears in Dec 31, 2003 – Jan 6, 2004.
