Fruitcake

by Sheena, 2001

Disclaimer: The X-Files and characters are the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and Twentieth Century Fox.. No infringement on copyright is intended.

Please do not post or distribute this story without the author's permission.

Four items: Fruitcake, thoughtfulness, the devil, and a memorial for the dead

*****

There is an art form to baking fruitcake. Some people start it weeks ahead, others months, hell, I even heard that Queen Victoria had hers started a year in advance and then it lay, in wait. My mother is somewhere between the venerable Mrs. Brown and folks who start on the eighteenth of December. She makes a great ritual on the first of November. She gathers together all the necessary ingredients amid the decaying pumpkin and the wrappers of leftover Hallowe'en candy. She puts on Christmas music and her favourite baking apron. That apron, by the way, had no sprinkling of holly, no reindeer or snappy saying; it was nearly white as too many years of little helping hands and spilled wine while preparing meals had rendered it a perplexing shade of its former colour. By the time she is done the room is awash in smells and tastes. The apron is dusty and at least one new stain has been added to its canvas and my strait laced and conventional mother is, well honestly, a tad inebriated.

On this particularly year she was more than a tad inebriated, actually her little helpers are not little and the most ardent of her helpers is more closely aliened with the devil then he is with the spirit of Christmas. He has in his thoughtfulness plied my mother with the very Glenfitch scotch in which she immersed that hapless fruitcake. He systematically pried from her a cornucopia of stories, tales and family legends about me that I can tell will take considerable self-control to ignore when they resurface in some tease or joke. But the worst of it all, like a memorial for the dead, my mother recounted with sadness and loss every boy friend that had ever stepped over the doorway. "Oh that one," she said in a hereto for unknown Irish brogue, "that one would have made my Dana a very happy woman!"

"Okay, okay," I interjected and walked to the sink with the dregs of the bottle in hand. "I think it is time to put this baking adventure to bed, don't you?" I asked Mulder as he tried unsuccessfully to control his grin. His enjoyment of how wonderfully relaxed my mother was and my incredible embarrassment was sickening. I don't think he realised how much of a teetotaler my mother is.

"I think she might be right, Mrs. Scully," Mulder suggested putting his arm around my mother's shoulder.

"Oh please, please call me Maggie. You know, Fox," she stage whispered into Mulder's ear looking at me secure in the drunken knowledge that I could not hear her. "The person who really needs to be taken to bed around here is Dana."

I was uncertain who blushed harder at that point - Mulder or me.

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