PONCA, Neb. (KTIV) -
Ever gotten fruit cake for Christmas? Did you think about tossing it away?
At Ponca State Park's Winterfest, people were not just tossing their fruit cakes, they turned it into a contest.
In fact rather than eat fruit cakes, people we found at the Ponca State Park event say they'd rather toss it, literally.
"It's one of those, everybody has fruit cakes and a lot of people don't like them, including myself, so I thought, let's do a fruit cake fling or something," Jeff Fields, Ponca State Park Superintendent said.
And that's how the Ponca State Park Superintendent says the idea for the fruit cake fling was born. The event is coming back in 2013, so if you're interested there's a couple things, you might want to know. For starters, flinging a fruit cake isn't as easy as you think.
"I didn't know what to expect, when I saw the fruit cake, I thought maybe I'd be able to grip it, then it was, but it was very very hard, luckily I took my gloves off, if they had laces on the fruit cake it would have been much better," Jim LaPierre from Papillion, Nebraska who won 1st place among people 13 and older.
"I thought it was going to be a lot harder, I thought that the fruit cake was going to be a lot bigger, and it was just this little thing, so I just tossed it, and made it like that far, by my brother's," Markus Martin who won 3rd place among people under 13 said.
Fields thinks he's finally found a way to make fruit cake a crowd pleaser.
"Fruit cake fling I think is going to be a very popular thing."
Fields also told us, the fruit cakes used today were not made to be wasted. They were baked with sunflower seeds and millet so the birds could pick up what the people tossed away.
Fruit cakes used for the contest were made with sunflowers and millets so birds could eat them afterwards.
