Toss that fruitcake!!! Win a trophy.

The holiday’s over - it’s time to toss the fruitcake. Okay, so it’s actually past the time to do it. The 15th annual Great Fruitcake Toss took place Saturday in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Dang!! We missed it!

Oh yeah, we didn’t receive a fruitcake this year. We’d have had to toss some Ugly Cake! (Those of you who read this blog regularly will get that joke.) No. Wait. They had “rentals” for $1. You could rent a cake to toss!Much like it’s older cousin, the Annual Punkin’ Chunkin’ in Delaware, the Great Fruitcake Toss has become a much anticipated event. Folks plan ahead and scheme to develop the best apparatus to toss the heavy dessert, or they spend months in training working those biceps for the hand tossing division.

There are a number of categories for which shiny trophies are awarded and your name appears in the paper - The Colorado Springs Gazette. You could be famous for simply “tossing your cake.” In addition to the hand tossing and the throwing by mechanical or pneumatic means, there are age categories, accuracy, distance and catching awards, too. There are two weight divisions : heavyweights at 4 lbs. and featherweights at 2 lbs.

Not much of a pitcher? You could enter your fruitcake in the Glamour Competition where prizes are given for the Most Beautiful, Ugliest and Most Creative. I hear tell there’s even a Fruitcake Derby where you can attach wheels and race your cake against others. Local hotels and inns offer specials for the event, including a fruitcake and even some coaching sessions to give you some tossin’ tips and tricks.
By the way, the all-time Great Fruitcake Toss record is 1,420’, set in 2007 by a group of Boeing engineers (Yeah, I’m sure they were a bit geeky.) who created the “Omega 380”, a mock artillery piece fueled by compressed air pumped by an exercise bike! Gives new meaning to the phrase “nutty as a fruitcake”, doesn’t it?

And, you wonder what too much snow can do to a brain?