Snow was falling softly past the street lamps in the village, muffling the sounds of the occasional car and the rattle of the brook down behind the post office and the general store. From almost every chimney, smoke drifted up through the falling snow. A few houses were hung with wreaths and colored lights around the front doors. Through the front windows gleamed lights on Christmas trees.
Just after seven o'clock, a pair of shaky headlights came slowly down the Three Mile Road, and an old blue pickup truck puttered into the light of the street lamps. The truck stopped at the first house. A man in overalls and rubber boots got out, reached back into the front seat for a small package, and trudged up through the snow to the kitchen door of the house. He knocked, the door opened, and he went inside. A few minutes later he came back out again, with the sound of voices following him. "Merry Christmas!" someone called, and he waved.
He got back into his truck, drove to the next house, and repeated the routine. Then to the next, and the next, all the way down through the village. Shortly after ten, he turned the old truck around, drove back up through the village, and disappeared into the night, his single red taillight glowing through the snow. Favor Johnson had delivered his Christmas presents again.
In every house where he'd stopped, there was now a small cylindrical package wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with the Christmas seals that come in the mail. When these packages were unwrapped, they revealed tin cans with one end removed and a fruitcake baked inside. For single folks and couples, it was a soup can; for families of up to five, a vegetable can; and for larger establishments, a tomato can -- all of them full to the brim with the most succulent fruitcake you could imagine. Mixed up with homemade butter and studded with hickory nuts, candied cherries and pineapple, citron, raisins, and currants, it was flavored with Favor's own hard cider.
Where old Favor had paused only momentarily or gone only as far as the doorstep, there remained the scuff marks of his boots in the snow, where he'd shuffled his feet nervously. But where he'd gone inside and chatted, or perhaps shared a bit of cheer, the distinctive odor of cow barn lingered faintly in the air, a further reminder of who had brought the foil-wrapped package for which each family was already making its special plans. And always some child would ask, "Why did Mr. Johnson bring us a fruitcake?"
"Well," a mother or father would answer, "it's just his way of saying 'Merry Christmas.'"
"Does he do it every year?"
"Yep."
"Does he take one to everybody in the village?"
"Yep."
"Has he always done it?"
Well, no he hadn't. And so the story of Favor Johnson and the flatlander doctor and the fruitcake would be told again.
<snip>
http://www.vpr.net/episode/42370/
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