By PAUL BOOTH
Don’t know what to do with that fruitcake you’ve already received for Christmas and aren’t going to eat?
Well, some of the residents at Seabrook Village in Tinton Falls had an answer for that question this holiday season; they played shuffleboard with the long derided holiday dessert.
“We thought this would be something fun and unique for our residents,” said Seabrook Village’s public relations manager Tony Ciavolella, who said residents had participated in a bocce tournament earlier in the year with gourds.
About a dozen residents, most of them members of the shuffleboard club that meets once a week, participated in the fruitcake shuffleboard tournament, held Dec. 10. Prizes were awarded and the contestants were allowed to keep their fruitcakes afterward if they so pleased.
Asked what they would do with their take home prizes, expected answers were offered.
“Use it for a doorstop,” one resident said.
“Feed to the birds,” another chimed in.
The eventual winner of the tournament, Elenore Englert, said she would probably take her fruitcake home and feed the squirrels, though she happens to enjoy the cake, most often made with dried fruit, nuts and spices.
“Ill be darned why people always say they don’t want them. I love them. This one here is a little beat up though,” Englert said, holding up the dessert.
Statistics show that 13 percent of people who receive fruitcakes for the holiday use it as a doorstop, nine percent simply throw them out and nearly 40 percent regift them. Seabrook Village residents were also given another option to dispose of their unwanted fruitcake this year, recycle it.
A website, www.fruitcakerecycling.com, claims to have workers “busily working on solutions to the fruitcake proliferation problem.”
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