Karen Smith has a whole year to make her sister sweat.
For 10 years she and her sister, Bonnie Skoffic of Venice, Fla., have been bushwhacking each other with a fruitcake. Every year it's passed back, and each year the presentations get more elaborate.This year Skoffic got the "Gordon Elliott Show" in New York to make the presentation in a nationwide broadcast. Since that show aired a week ago, the TV magazine "Inside Edition" has been calling to get in on how Smith will send it back.
But Smith said she wants to wait.
"I have a year to make her sweat," she said. "I don't want to send it back this soon."
The fruitcake odyssey started a decade ago when the Smiths lived in Georgia and were invited to Florida to meet Bonnie's new husband, Kevin Skoffic, a Venice police officer.
"Somehow the conversation got around to things we didn't like and Kevin said there were three things he saw no reason for their existence: chain letters, cats and fruitcakes," Smith said.
On the way home Smith stopped at a souvenir store, where she saw a fruitcake. Thinking she'd have a little fun, she bought it, took it home and drafted a fake chain letter with the instructions that if it were passed on, the sender would receive fruitcakes.
Two weeks later she sent the fruitcake to her sister with a black cat Christmas ornament, and the battle lines were drawn. Over the years each sister has presented the cake to her sibling in a more outlandish fashion than the other.
One year Smith had a Florida radio station call her sister and tell her she had won a nice prize. She rushed to the station to pick it up and was presented with the fruitcake.
This year it was Smith's turn to be surprised.
Last August Bonnie Skoffic began contacting talk shows, and the Gordon Elliott Show responded. The show was planning an episode on "Gordon's Greatest Ambushes, Part I." Another sister, Edie Strayer, tricked Smith into calling the show to get her son, 12-year-old Neil, on the program. Neil is interested in modeling and the show was purportedly going to have an episode on the subject.
The show then flew her and Neil to New York, put them up in the Paramount Hotel and took them to the show the next morning.
Finally, while Smith and her son were on stage, her sister, Bonnie, walked out with the fruitcake on a silver platter trimmed with roses, followed by the Seaford, N.Y., High School Marching Band.
Following the show, Elliott took Neil aside and introduced him to people from Wilhelmina Models, a national modeling agency.
"I don't know how I'm going to top it, but I've got to come up with something good," Smith said of the gag.