The monkey makes happy chipping sounds when I unwrap the fruits. We have a ritual, he and I. In New York, as the arbiter of all things sweet and sugary, he preferred to eat a cherry first, expressing his pleasure with chips and catlike purrs. Now he paces impatiently on the back of a chair as I hand him one. He sniffs it, glowers at me, and hurls it to the floor. Bits of candied pineapple, orange, and lemon fall beside the rejected cherry. Signora Dolce's fruits have spoiled us all.

1971 Unable to find good candied fruits, I resolve to make them. Haven't cooks candied fruits for centuries? Whether the sweetener is honey or sugar, the preserving process, though tedious, is simple: You steep fruit in increasingly stronger solutions of hot syrup that replace the fruit's natural moisture and prevent spoilage. In June, I begin with cherries, changing and strengthening the syrup daily, and watch the fruits fatten nicely on their high-sugar diet. Just one week in, disaster strikes. Overnight, floating islets of mold form. Should I have used more sugar? I toss the batch and finally my luck improves with pineapple. But best of all are candied orange and lemon peels, which soak up syrup so quickly they don't have time to spoil. With these, I can bake a fruitcake that makes all of us purr.

1978 Almost toothless now, my severest critic can no longer chew candied fruits, but he still perches on a kitchen chair to wait for a spoonful of batter. Our world has changed in other ways, too. Now I have a fruitcake assistant in the form of my 6-year-old son, who loves to cut parchment paper to fit the baking tins, measure and sift the flour and spices, and break eggs just as a Basque chef taught him to. I miss these holiday baking sessions, and long after he leaves home I ask him in a wistful moment what he remembers. "The shot of rum you poured for me and how soused I felt," he says without skipping a beat. I'm shocked. "I never would have done that! Maybe a tiny sip, but surely not a glass." But it's his fruitcake story, and he sticks to it.

1988 After years of writing about French cuisine and reviewing French restaurants in California, I am in France for the first time. Everything is fresh yet oddly familiar. In Nice, I fall hard for socca and wonder why I never find these addictive chickpea-flour cakes in California. (In the next decade, I will.) Squeezing into La Merenda beside a cute Frenchman, I learn the trick of removing mussel meat with an empty shell. On market day on the Cours Saleya, eager shoppers snap up the season's first cèpes and girolles, but I'm transfixed by a stall with bins of sparkling fruits confits. Though not the flawless jewels on display in the window of Henri Auer, they taste heavenly, cost much less, and sweeten the finest fruitcakes we've enjoyed since moving west. Two years later, on my first visit to Italy, I luck out again at an outdoor market in Ravenna.

2008 The card, a Gary Larson classic, depicts a goofy manger scene with the caption, "Unbeknownst to most theologians, there was a fourth wise man, who was turned away for bringing a fruitcake." Inside is a message from my son and his wife: "Don't worry. We'd never turn you or your fruitcake away from our door." But this year they might. We are living in Arizona and still finding our way around the markets. The candied-fruit situation is hopeless. "How about these?" My husband holds up a package of cactus-fruit jellies. I think he's kidding. A new friend returns from a summer in northern Michigan with a fresh crop of dried Montmorency cherries. I'm captivated by their tart-sweet complexity and decide to pair them in a cake with currants, golden raisins, orange-flavored cranberries, and a few luscious Arizona-grown Medjool dates. This is a far departure from my mother's cake, but the recipe is wonderfully flexible and forgiving. I'm not ready to give up the sparkle of candied fruits entirely, so I splurge on a pound of mail-order Italian orange peel and citron from an Oakland market. Four glacéed apricots left over from a birthday go in, too. The cake is the darkest I've ever baked, and I'm a little nervous when I bring it out during the holidays. "It's wonderful, as always," my son reassures me. My husband lifts a glass of port in a salute. "One of the best fruitcakes you've ever made." He always says that. And I smile.

THE BEST CHRISTMAS CAKE

In 1958 Caroline Bates joined the staff of Gourmet, whose offices at the time were in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel in New York. She spent the next 51 years with the magazine, primarily as a writer specializing in food history, travel, and restaurants. Moving to California in the late 1960s, she and her photographer-husband wrote a Sunset guidebook to a still-wild Baja California and produced dozens of Gourmet articles, many of them about native foods and great American places. In 1974, Bates began a restaurant column for Gourmet that chronicled the rise of farm-fresh California cuisine; the sushi craze; and the growing diversity of international cooking in the West Coast's large cities. She now lives in southeastern Arizona, where chiles fire up her cooking and bobcats snooze on her patio.