In 1910, the townspeople of the small South Georgia community of Claxton saw a new business open its doors. The tempting aroma of freshly-baked bread and sweet rolls served as an irresistible invitation to visit the Claxton Bakery.

The bakery opened under the ownership of Savino Tos, an Italian pastry maker, who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s.

During the fall of that year, Tos decided to capture the spirit of the holiday season by offering a premium-quality fruit cake, filled with nature’s finest fruits and nuts — and thus creating the Claxton Fruit Cake.

If you visit the bakery today as I once did, you’ll find rows and rows of ovens with the capacity to bake over 86,000 pounds of Claxton Fruit Cake daily.

Thanks to Claxton and others, the holidays are full of fruit cakes — not just the edible kind.

If you doubt it, just wait until all of those colorful family members get together. I’m sure you’ll find one or two fruit cakes in the bunch.

But there is another more sobering way a fruit cake can be used to illustrate the holiday season.

A fruit cake is filled with a variety of tastes and textures. Every bite is different than the one before and so is the holiday season for many of the people we know right here in our community.

For some, the holiday season brings with it the sweet flavor of family and friends. It’s a time to get together with those we love and celebrate all of the blessings of life. The days are soft, filled with the warmth of good times and the aroma of a bright new year.

For others, this time of year can be difficult. As they bite into the holidays, they find only hard shells that have been left behind by a year of difficulty.

Perhaps death or sickness has slipped in like the Grinch and robbed them of their “Peace on Earth.”

Maybe a lost job has left their nights far from silent and their days filled with uncertainty.

Fortunately, the holidays can be made palatable — depending on how you slice it. Let me explain.

The Bible reminds us that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

Now there’s a promise from God you can sink your teeth into! There is literally nothing that can separate us from the love of God! Later in that same chapter, Paul asks the question “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Romans 8:35)

He then begins a checklist of things we would consider devastating but Paul concludes that none of them “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So, this holiday season, why not get that sour taste out of your mouth by treating yourself to a nice slice of fruit cake, and with every bite be reminded that in the middle of all of life’s noise there is a “still small voice” whispering “I love you.”

Now that is a dessert that can satisfy just about anyone!

Jeff Davenport is the senior pastor at Mamre Baptist Church in Kitts Hill.