What Happened To Fruitcake?

Remember when people gave each other fruitcake for Christmas? No one ever ate it, of course, but we all gave it like it was manna from heaven. Even if the fruitcake inevitably exited the house in much the same condition it entered — harder, perhaps, but intact — at least it didn’t come pre-ingested:

In this season of strange presents from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt in the box.
Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified whale vomit worth as much as $18,000.
“I called my sister and asked her, ‘What the heck did you send me?’ ” recalled Ms. Ferreira, 67, who has lived here on the eastern tip of Long Island since 1982. “She said: ‘I don’t know, but I found it on the beach in Montauk 50 years ago and just kept it around. You’re the one who lives by the ocean; ask someone out there what it is.’ ”

And just when one would think this story gets weird enough, it turns out that the reason whale vomit gets that much attention and cash is because it’s particularly valuable … for perfumes. Ambergris has commanded large amounts of money and is fairly rare, which means that Ferreira may have been given a four-pound lottery ticket. Only two problems remain for Ferreira: no one can find an ambergris expert any more to identify it, and its sale is forbidden in most cases due to anti-whaling laws.
I think I’d prefer the fruitcake. It’s just as inedible, but I don’t need to hire a non-existent expert to tell me that.