Joyride III

Christmastime is truly here when you eat fudge for breakfast. At least in our family. 
Having grown up in Cape May, I crave a little glimpse of the red beads and white lights that dot the town this time of year.  A kind of homecoming. 
So at the end of the last school day before Christmas break (always a half day), I shuffle my four kids down the shore for a little Victorian salute.
One of our first holiday stops is counting the Santas adorning the Virginia Hotel on Jackson Street.  There is always a debate about how many: Thirteen seems to be the consensus.
One Dec. 23, we bought fudge at the Fudge Kitchen on the mall when my son Elijah asked, “Dad can we eat fudge for breakfast on Christmas?” Caught up in the holiday spirit, my parent brain appeared to be turned off.
Before I could stop myself, I had replied, “Great idea Elijah.” I guess my wife, Kris, was suffering from the same affliction.  She seemed intrigued by the idea. “Just get a variety,” she said.
Ever since then, fudge has been part of our holiday tradition. But I think those creamy globs mean more than just Christmas.
To me, it’s a taste of my hometown and a tapestry of memories of Christmas past.  It’s the year that a giant stocking filled as big as a person with gifts showed up outside our door at our house on Jefferson Street. 
It was like a Christmas miracle for us.  A trying year for my late mother as we were all numb from an ugly divorce. It was hard to make ends meet that year, especially at Christmastime.  But I never felt the holiday spirit any more intensely than at that moment.
For my kids, fudge is about childhood and summer weeks spent in Cape May.  There is nothing more primal for a child than being able to break the most cardinal rule of all: No candy for breakfast.
It’s about our “Cape May house,” as they call it. The place we rent across from the bus station for a week every summer. It’s about our peculiar world that is caught between the ‘shoobies’ we are now and the Cape May native I was then. 
When we make our fudge pilgrimage, we always take a photo in front of the giant nutcrackers at Congress Hall.  Each year, those nutcrackers get smaller as the kids grow taller.
The fudge brings us together, then and now.  The moment we pick out the fudge is something rare for a family with four kids.  
Only children can bring such a perfect earnestness to choosing fudge flavors. All of them in tune at that moment, there is a kind of beauty as the quartet negotiate the perfect combinations for Christmas morning.
The usual bickering turned into cooperation by the childhood wonder of it. Vanilla, Chocolate, a dose of marshmallow, and lobbying for something more exotic by my oldest.
“Dad, can’t we get some pumpkin spice too?” 14-year-old Kameron usually asks.    
“Would you like this wrapped?” the clerk always asks. “Of course,” we say.  It wouldn’t be Christmas fudge without it.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was a teenager asking those same questions behind the counter at Love’s Fudge.  Life comes full circle.
The Cape May streets have that Christmas stillness as we go on one last candlelight walk, before transporting our fudge home, now in Collingswood. 
A memory at every corner. And lots of questions about them from the kids. 
“I can’t wait to eat the fudge,” says 10-year-old Madeline. 
“Let’s not hurry Christmas too much,” I say.  
Keith Forrest is an associate professor of communication at Atlantic Cape Community College. His late mother Libby Demp Forrest Moore wrote the Joyride column for this newspaper for 20 years.