Ooooh fudge is fancy. Fudge is a fancy thing rich people eat — so each year we would have fudge, but we weren’t rich you know, and fudge sounds quite difficult to make but in the 80’s a revolution happened.
“The recipe for fantasy fudge (a.k.a. marshmallow creme fudge) originally appeared on the back of the jar of Kraft’s marshmallow creme. The sweet treat has become a tradition in countless homes over the years, particularly during the holiday season.”
All Recipes
In the 80’s we all thought margarine was a superior product to actual real butter.
Even in recipes that called for butter it was swapped out. Also everything was fried in Crisco and everybody smoked. It was a different time. A time of ‘Fantasy Fudge’ a sickly sweet, sometimes grainy, disgusting confection that was impossible to get through because it is straight up nasty. As a kid in the 80’s my diet was 90% sugar and processed crap and Dr. Pepper and it was too gross even for me.
“Grandma, you have an extra jar of Marshmallow Creme, can I eat it with a spoon?” — Sure sweetie.
Hu, why did I have so much anxiety as a kid? Was it my shit diet? We’ll never know.
So holidays to me are stuffy trailer homes with bad fudge. In the tiny single wide would cram my aunts, uncles, cousins and relatives – all of whom smoked for the most part. So I would head outside into the woods all day and that was a good time. The smoke would settle into a line about 5ft of the floor. It permeated everything. The oven was going and going and the thermostat was always set to 73 in the winter so it was fucking miserable.
CAN I PLEASE OPEN A GOD DAMNED WINDOW. No, No you can’t. That would waste electricity. My grandmother survived to aged 83 on a piss poor diet and constant cigarette smoke and she only ever had high blood pressure. I never saw her sick otherwise.
Occasionally grandma opened her little kitchen window when the heat from the oven just got too much. How she made so much food in such a tiny kitchen is really something.
The night and days before when relatives were coming in the table leaf would go in and the card decks would come out and they would play Kanasta or King’s Corner. Grandpa would play dominoes with us kids. Grandpa had emphysema, and I believe that’s been relabeled COPD these days. Anyway, it was serious enough he had to quit smoking regular cigarettes and smoke menthol. He was given cigarettes during WW II to smoke. He served four years.
(Later in ’93, Grandpa died outdoors with his chickens of a coronary on a bright sunny day in a favorite chair. His chickens perched on his lap. I can’t think of a better death really. He was 75 I believe.)
The Aunties and Uncles.
So I had plenty of Aunts and Uncles, but of those almost all had only one child or none at all. They weren’t cut from the same cloth as my Grandma and Grandpa and maybe that was part of the issue they had – they were never quite that tough. Neither of my grandparents had an education and could barely read / write but both had worked through their childhoods. Grandma shoveling coal for a neighbor for a slice of bread and to squeeze near the furnace to stay warm on account she was in real danger of freezing / starving to death as a six year old. A stress most of us don’t really know a lot about. Grandma had gone through her sister dying, her mother dying and finding herself alone in the world with but a brother she cared for, until he died in an accident. Grandpa was one of 11 children and there were so any because there was a farm to work and it was all manual labor.
My Grandparents never complained, they worked from sun up to sun down despite being retired and were stalwart. I don’t know what the hell happened to their boomer children.
Every holiday was the same bullshit. “You got Joe (the youngest and baby of the family) a bicycle for his 7th birthday. A NEW, a brand new bicycle! And you never bought me a bike.” Well Uncle Gerry was 10 years older… he used that as an excuse to drink for over FIFTY YEARS.
He could have bought a nice bicycle and road it across the US. Become a cyclist. To my knowledge… he never owned a bike. He never thought, hmm, it’s pretty nice my little brother was able to have a bicycle since I didn’t get one. Maybe I didn’t get one because ten years had passed and money fluctuates…
All the kids were pretty much, “YOU OWE ME” from the time they said waaaaa. They sucked my grandparents dry, with the exception of Uncle Joe, maybe because he received a bicycle once he wasn’t a huge leech.
One time Uncle Gerry tried to kill Uncle Joe. The story I heard was that Joe’s car had stalled out on the highway on a hill, he had gotten out to check something and it just so happened that Gerry topped the hill at a high rate of speed and ran him over. The other story was that Joe had tried to flag down his brother for a bit of help and Gerry hit the gas.
One time Uncle Gerry threatened to punch me in the face on my 16th birthday: AT MY BIRTHDAY PARTY. Yeah fuck that guy.
He had a daughter who wasn’t excited about the present he bought her, a cow. He bought her a cow for her graduation or something. Anyway, she didn’t know what to do with the gift of cattle, she lived in town and all — so he vowed to never talk to her again. I said something like…”well maybe she isn’t too much into cattle, maybe just sell it and get her something else” and he went off on me saying it was taking all his self-control not to physically attack me right there and then.
Which wasn’t as bad as the time he tried to kill my uncle by running him over with a car, and I’m unsure anyone TOLD my uncle Joe about that when he woke up from the coma. He had to learn to walk again and talk again and it took months at home to get rehabilitated. And Gerry just shrugged it off and said to the rest of the family, ‘it was an accident. Didn’t see him there.’ But I doubt Joe’s son ever knew of the incident and it wasn’t discussed. But fuck Gerry and his attempted murder.
Gerry never worked a job to my knowledge. Ever. I think maybe he sold drugs or something, idk. He was really into football but never played. He was in amazing natural physical shape which was a little incongruous with his otherwise ‘charming‘ personality. My Grandmother though was always very well muscled and strong. He never was fat and had plenty of muscle. He attended my Mom’s funeral with a smirk and his arms crossed. I stared right at him because I didn’t really give a shit what he thought. I was pretty sure he had broke out the window on my car – which everyone knew who had done that and why, but they wouldn’t tell me.
It is almost Thanksgiving, so a nod at those people in the past who thought the world would stay the same forever, maybe that’s the way kids see the world. Gerry is gone, they’re all gone now. Passed and not much left to even remind the world they were here besides stories by old cynics like myself.
I dreamed last night that Dad, who passed away last year, showed up at my backdoor and he had a tray of that damn awful fantasy fudge. lol
