Now that Christmas is over and the lazy, contemplative holiday week is in full sway, consider the poor fruitcake. It used to be a mainstay. Somehow it has become largely a butt of sneering jokes.

True, several groups of Trappist monks and food suppliers such as Harry & David and Collin Street Bakery have continued to market their versions of fruitcake. And older women seem content to make them each year. But ugly criticism seems to have mostly taken over – Wisecracks such as “doorstop” and “nutty as a fruitcake.”

Take, for example, a piece last Saturday in The Wall Street Journal that described fruitcake as “one holiday tradition that inspires both reverence and revulsion” and then harped on the revulsion. The article went on and on about the taste (“dense as lead and just about as tasty”) and appearance (“ghastly little neon-colored bits”) and concluded that “bright red and green candied fruit, the key ingredient that once provided fruitcake’s festive charm, became an emblem of culinary atrocity.”

The writer, Susan Warren, even managed to find a monastery fruitcakery that used to produce concrete blocks and now has switched to fruitcakes and a monk who said, “If you liked our concrete blocks, you’ll love our fruitcakes.”

Enough already. What’s the matter with red and green, the traditional Christmas colors now often displaced by monotonous silver colored decorations? And of course fruitcake is rich, but that doesn’t mean you should hog out on it.

There remain many folks who remember the times when Christmas always meant opening up a tin that had been stored for weeks or months and sampling a fruitcake lovingly loaded with candied cherries, bright green citron and yellow lemon peel, seasoned with cloves and other spices and maybe covered with a cloth that had been soaked repeatedly with rum or brandy.

Done right, a fruitcake was so full of fruit and nuts that a thin slice held up to the light looked like a stained glass window.

How could Ms. Warren have approved of some bakers who have decided to “ditch the fruit?” It’s the fruit that has always made it a fruitcake. She acknowledges that when early Christmas fruitcakes were made in the Middle Ages, the makers baked dried fruits and nuts with just enough batter to hold the mix together. She reports that the Crusaders are said to have packed fruitcake for their long journey to the Holy Land and that it became so popular that it was outlawed for a time in Europe as being too “sinfully rich.”

That’s what children used to have in mind as they went over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house at Christmastime.

So, unless you have been swept along by the jeers and brick bats, give a thought to collecting a lot of red, green and yellow candied fruit and a lot of pecans or walnuts and producing an old-time treat for next Christmas. And don’t hold back on the rum or brandy.