Huh. Aloha must mean Merry Christmas in Hawaiian too.

Huh. Aloha must mean Merry Christmas in Hawaiian too.

I don’t know about you, but lately its been visions of budding Filipino porn star Ken Ott that’s been dancing in my head and not sugar plums. ‘Cuz I don’t even know what sugar plums are. And the only sugar plum fairy I know of is a rather obese drag queen who’s just a bit too campy for my taste. But since it’s Aloha Friday, and since sugar plums sound suspiciously like crack seed, I thought I’d let Google inform me just what in the hell all the fuss is about sugar plums. And Google sent me to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia too hasn’t a clue. Oh, some troll snuck in an answer. But it’s wrong. Sugar plums have nothing to do with plums, and nothing to do with the fact that plums were once preserved by boiling them in sugar. I’m as right in claiming Noom has a pair of sugar plums hanging between his legs as Wikipedia’s answer is. So it turns out that no one else is quite sure what sugarplums are, despite their fame during the holidays. Kinda like Boxing Day. Everyone’s heard of it, many take the day off as a holiday, but no one can tell you about its origin. I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that considering what is loosely referred to as British cuisine, sugarplums and Boxing Day are both British inventions. Then again, maybe Christmas pudding was a serious enough offense against the holidays that we should let the Brits off on this one.

No problemo. To get to the heart of the matter of what sugar plums are, one only has to go to the source of why most of us associate them with Christmas: Clement Clark Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, aka. Twas the Night Before Christmas, in which the children were nestled all snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads. The one thing we all know about children is that they are all greedy little bastards. And nothing exemplifies the spirit of Xmas like greed. So much so the annual Black Friday melee at Walmart should be known as The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.

Nice set of sugar plums, dude.

Nice set of sugar plums, dude.

So let’s harken back to the days of old when the classes were well-defined and well-divided – or as the Republicans refer to them ‘when America was the America I grew up in – and when the world was made up of the haves and the have-nots for a Christmas tale of corporate greed and how it ruined a sweet deal for the job creators of that age. ‘Cuz being a 1%er in those days was an especially plum job.

Being an aristocrat in the 1500s had many advantages. And surely beat the shit out of being poor. Slavery was alive and well, and subjugating conquered people was a popular pastime among the rich. Child labor was just referred to as labor, and the only minimum wage in existence was that the wages of the lower classes were kept to a minimum. Not that any of that has anything to do with sugar plums. I just thought I’d remind you how good things once were. So along with treating the masses as a disposable resource, the rich of the day were constantly striving to find things to set themselves above their fellow man, preferably thanks to the sweat of said fellow man. And one of the sweetest ideas they came up with were sugar plums.

Sugar plums were a type of confectionery. But not just any confectionery. Some poor slob (preferably one you owned) spent several days toiling over a hot oven to make a single batch of sugar plums. They started with a central seed or kernel – caraway seeds, almonds, and cardamom seeds were popular – and laboriously built successive layers of hardened sugar around the seed in a process called panning. Each layer had to be allowed to harden before the next layer of sugar could be applied. The process was slowly continued until the resulting piece of candy was the size of a small plum. Hence the name sugar plum. You’ll note no where in the recipe was an actual plum used. But undoubtedly the sweat of the poor person making them added an entirely new level of sweetness to the candy.

Looks like a sugar plum fairy to me.

Looks like a sugar plum fairy to me.

Obviously, sugar plums were considered a luxury good, and were most likely to be found in an aristocrat’s pocket or served between courses at a rich person’s banquet. So Moore’s children nestled in their beds weren’t just dreaming about candy that they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever tasting, but of the riches and life of luxury they hoped would one day be their’s. ‘Cuz even if the have-nots never got to try a sugar plum, they all knew what they were (probably because when a 1%er got to that nasty caraway seed in the middle of his he’d spit it out at the closest poor person). Ahhhh. Good times.

As a symbol of the lifestyle of the rich and infamous, sugar plums were quite popular and quickly entered the lexicon of the day. If your ‘mouth was full of sugar plums’, it meant that you spoke sweet but undoubtedly deceitful words. ‘Cuz even the rich don’t trust the rich. And if you ‘stuffed another’s mouth with sugar plums’, that referred to paying someone a bribe. Because they had lobbyists to protect rich people’s interests back then too. Soon everyone shortened the term to plum, and the Brits – ya knew the Brits would come into it sooner or later – used plum as slang for 100 pounds, or more generally, a big pile of moola. Plum eventually came to mean any especially desirable thing: a prize, a choice job, or a station in life. All of which were reserved for the enjoyment of the haves. When it came to plums, the have-nots were plum out of luck.

Now if your face has been turning those funny colors it tends to while you’ve been muttering, “But, but, but . . .” because I started this tale off by claiming your familiarity with sugar plums was due to Moore’s famous Christmas poem about childhood greed, and you are a cultured gay who wants to claim it’s your love of The Nutcracker instead, let’s take a quick look at what is probably Tchaikovsky’s most famous piece of work. in Act Two, the Land of Sweets is ruled by the Sugar Plum Fairy while Prince Coqueluche is out getting a bit of strange on the side. Because that’s what the rich did in those days. It’s also why they came up with the idea of serving wenches. ‘Cuz even among the poor you occasionally ran across fish that was beddable.

The real question of the day is since Tchaikovsky was gay, why did he compose a ballet about some poor dude's nuts getting cracked?

The real question of the day is since Tchaikovsky was gay, why did he compose a ballet about some poor dude’s nuts getting cracked?

So with Chocolate and Candy Cane in the house, you’ve probably wondered why in the hell Sugar Plum got to be head confectionery. Or at least questioned that role when you were not busy checking out the prince’s massive bulge and his lovingly encased taut buttocks. Uh, hello? I just explained that to you. So now can I get back to my tale? Geesh! You ballet gays plum tire me out.

So things were going well, the rich were rich, the poor were getting poorer, and life was sweet thanks to having a sugar plum or two to suck on. But it’s not enough to enjoy the poor getting poorer when you are rich, getting richer has its draw too. And nothing said greater corporate profits in those days than the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to steam heat and mechanized machinery the haves found they could get even more production out of their employees than before without paying them a penny more, and with only the occasional loss of a poor person when he, she, or it (as children were properly referred to in those days) fell into said mechanized machinery. ‘Cuz the socialist hadn’t invented OSHA yet.

Unfortunately that also meant the advent of mechanized rotating pans. And less-skilled workers could now make larger batches of sugar plums more easily. In quantity. At a much lower price. So soon it was sugar plums for all. And not just sugar plums. The falling price of sugar and the invention of labor-saving machinery meant all manner of small candies were heaping up on the confectioner’s counter. That’s how we got M&Ms. And how a once noble confectionery reserved for the enjoyment of the haves became plentiful and available to anyone with a sweet tooth. And once sugar plums were no longer a symbol of success, everyone realized that as a piece of candy, they kinda suck. Which is why no one knows what they are, or were, today.

No more sugar plums to be had? I'm sure you can find something else to suck on for the holidays.

No more sugar plums to be had? I’m sure you can find something else to suck on for the holidays.

Now you’d think the moral of this story is the danger of corporate greed and how it can lead to the loss of entitlements almost as valuable as profits. But the real lesson here is that when you have something sweet that the masses can’t afford to enjoy you need to sneak a law banning them from its use into an unrelated piece of has-to-be-passed legislation. Like a appropriations bill. Or the federal budget. Like Congress just did to repeal the Dodd-Frank derivatives rule that was supposed to isolate risky trading of those financial instruments that played a major role in the 2008 financial crisis when we broke the world’s economy from parts of a bank eligible for a government bailout. Or to put it another way, when you spend $1.5 million per day to buy influence in Washington, you can expect a few juicy plums to fall your way. Hee, hee, hee. Oooops, my bad. I meant ho, ho, ho.