Stir-up Sunday ~ Celtic Advent Day 10

Matt Riggott, Wiki Commons

Our festivals so often begin and end in food, in warm, full bellies, and in the warmth of good company; so deeply human in this wild world of the woven sacred. And so, what a fine few days we had at the beginning of this week with, firstly, Stir-up Sunday, falling every year on the Sunday before Advent begins, and then, on Monday, one of my favourite holy days, Catterntide; both fragrant with the evocative scents of winter spices ~ cinnamon and clove, caraway seeds and mixed spice, ginger and nutmeg. Delicious!

Stir-up Sunday, which has become associated with the making of Christmas puddings, in fact takes its name from the opening words of the collect of the day in the 1594 edition of the ‘Book of Common Prayer’; ‘collect’ being the name for a short prayer that gathers up the theme for a particular day in the Christian liturgy;

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” 

Because the ‘stir-up’ prayer came with the specification that it "shall always be used upon the Sunday next before Advent”, and, as most Christmas pudding recipes require the pudding to be kept for several weeks to mature before eating, it acted as a fine reminder that the time had come for pudding making.

Although the Sunday before Advent is now more usually celebrated as ‘Christ the King’, it has retained its popularity as a prompt to gather around the kitchen table and make puddings in preparation for Christmas Day.

Traditionally this would be a family exploit, with parents teaching their children how to add the ingredients and everyone taking a turn to stir wishes into the pudding mix. I have heard tell that stirring a Christmas pudding can be hard work, with it containing thirteen ingredients to symbolise Jesus and the Twelve Apostles, and so this tradition also served to share the load.

Sometimes silver coins would be added, to bring wealth to the finder when the pudding was eaten. Other hidden charms might include a wishbone for good luck, a tiny anchor for safe harbour, and a silver thimble for thrift, with the mix stirred East to West to symbolise the journey of the Three Wise Men. I love how mindfulness and meaning is threaded into every action in our oldest traditions, something that we could learn much from today.

Indeed, a survey conducted by The Cumberland News in 2013, found that two-thirds of British children had never experienced stirring the Christmas pudding. In this age of shop bought and conveniently ready-made food so much togetherness has been lost, and of course in our modern houses many kitchens aren't large enough for a table, let alone for a family to gather around it. No wonder then that we are encouraged to forget what once bound us together.

doningtonleheath.org.uk

So many things seem to be only done now because ‘that’s just what you do’, rather than because it has meaning, although I value that somewhere in our deep memories we still feel the pull to do it anyway. A precious thread. How much better then to consciously stir the once-remembered meaning into every mouthful of our festive food?

Traditional Christmas pudding may have its origins in medieval England in a Christmas porridge known as Frumenty, although recipes for the pudding that we would recognise appear only in the 17th Century. One of the earliest is to be found in in Mary Kettilby’s 1714 book, ‘A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery’. Another precursor may be the medieval dish known as figgy pudding, which was made with figs, ginger, wine, and honey.

There is an unconfirmed story that King George I, sometimes referred to as the ‘Pudding King’, asked for a Christmas pudding to be served at his Christmas feast in 1714, his first Christmas in England, but it wasn’t until the 1830s that our familiar pudding became truly associated with our midwinter feast. Prior to this it was mostly eaten at harvest time; a strange thought now.

As for Christmas pudding, often referred to as ‘plum pudding’, due to the pre-Victorian habit of referring to raisins as 'plums'. many households would once have had their own recipes, handed down through generations.

https://stmargarets.london/archives/2016/11/advent.html

The thirteen ingredients mentioned earlier included a mixture of dried fruits, candied peel, and spices, held together with flour, suet, and beaten eggs. Sometimes these would be moistened with treacle giving the pudding its traditionally dark colour. And, of course, there was the addition of alcohol, such as brandy, stout, or porter. In poorer households, who could make a steamed pudding even without an oven, this might have been replaced with cold tea, and the eggs omitted, but even then the Christmas pudding was meant to be heavy and luxurious, drawing together many ingredients that wouldn’t have been used at other times of year. Something special, unlike our modern era where the Christmas pudding has become something to be endured at the end of an already heavy meal. This, again, is a reminder that so many of us have so much more than we need that our celebrations of abundance have become almost more than we can stomach. Bloated on plenty, we have lost our sense of food as holy, althougu the echoes are still there. And, of course, this is encouraged too, with our holidays becoming shorter and shorter and we expected to be productive on every day and in every season; a spell that needs to be broken, a wish to stir into the pudding mix.

As ever, Charles Dickens, who more or less single handedly invented the Christmas we know today, brings us back to the heart of the matter. In 1843, in ‘A Christmas Carol’, he wrote;

"Mrs Cratchit left the room alone – too nervous to bear witnesses – to take the pudding up and bring it in... Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper which smells like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quarter of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top."

Cratchit's Christmas Pudding, pinterest

And here is my promise to myself that, next year on Stir-up Sunday, I will invite our friends and neighbours to help stir our Christmas pudding. In your own house you may still have time to do that this year. Traditions may be lost but it's never too late to make new ones.

In the meantime, I wish for us all the joy of a Christmas pudding, stirred through with wishes and topped with a sprig of holly, to grace our table on Christmas Day. And I wish too for us all the wild-mindedness to know what it means.

References: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir-up_Sunday 

https://stmargarets.london/archives/2016/11/advent.html

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/christmas/christmas-countdown/a550045/ultimate-stir-up-sunday-when/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_pudding 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figgy_pudding