by Maria Grace
Many Christmas traditions and images of ‘old fashioned’ holidays are based on Victorian celebrations. Going back just a little further, to the beginning of the 19th century, the holiday Jane Austen knew would have looked distinctly odd to modern sensibilities.
How odd? Families rarely decorated Christmas trees. Festivities centered on socializing instead of gift-giving. Festivities focused on adults, with children largely consigned to the nursery. Holiday events, including balls, parties, dinners, and even wedding celebrations, started a week before Advent (the fourth Sunday before Christmas) and extended all the way through to Twelfth Night in January.
As today, not everyone celebrated the same way or observed all the same customs, but many observances were widely recognized. Some of the traditions and dates that might have been observed included:
Stir it up Sunday
On the fifth Sunday before Christmas, the family would gather to ‘stir up’ Christmas puddings that needed to age before serving at Christmas dinner.
December 6th: St. Nicholas Day
In a tradition from Northern Europe, the day might be celebrated with the exchange of small gifts, particularly for children. House parties and other Christmastide visiting also began on or near this day.
December 21st: St. Thomas Day
Elderly women and widows went ‘thomasing’ at the houses of their more fortunate neighbors, hoping for gifts of food or money. Oftentimes landowners cooked and distributed wheat, an especially expensive commodity, to the ‘mumpers’ who came begging.
December 24th: Christmas Eve
Holiday decorating happened on Christmas Eve when families cut or bought evergreen boughs to deck the house. The greenery remained in place until Epiphany when it was removed and burned lest it bring bad luck.
December 25th: Christmas day
Families typically began the day with a trip to church and might pick up their Christmas goose from the local baker on the way home. Though gifts were not usually exchanged on Christmas, children might receive small gifts and cottagers might give generous landowners a symbolic gift in appreciation of their kindness.
The day culminated in a much anticipated feast. Traditional foods included boar’s head, brawn, roast goose, mince meat pies, and the Christmas puddings made a month earlier.
December 26th: Boxing Day
After receiving their Christmas boxes, servants usually enjoyed a rare day off. Churches distributed the money from their alms-boxes.
Families might attend the opening day of pantomimes. The wealthy traditionally enjoyed fox hunting on this day.
~Peter Parley, Tales about Christmas
December 31: New Year’s Eve
Families thoroughly cleaned the house before gathering in a circle before midnight to usher out the old year and in the new.
Some Scots and folks of northern England believed in ‘first footing’—the first visitor to set foot across the threshold after midnight on New Year’s Eve affected the family's fortunes. The ‘first footer’ entered through the front door and left through the back door, taking all the old year's troubles and sorrows with him.
Jan 1: New Year’s Day
The events of New Year’s Day predicted the fortunes for the coming year, with a variety of traditions said to discern the future like ‘creaming the well’, or the burning of a hawthorn bush.
Jan 6th: Twelfth Night
A feast day honoring the coming of the Magi, Epiphany or Twelfth Night, marked the traditional climax of the holiday season and the time when celebrants exchanged gifts.
Revels, masks and balls were the order of the day. With the rowdy games and large quantities of highly alcoholic punch, they became so raucous that Queen Victoria outlawed Twelfth Night parties by the 1870′s.
The Joys of Plum Pudding
"Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper [boiler]. A smell like washing–day! That was the cloth [the pudding bag]. 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-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top."
"Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage..."
Charles Dickens~A Christmas Carol
Origins of Plum Pudding
Plum pudding stands out as one of the few foods that can trace its history back at least eight hundred years. It began in Roman times as a pottage, a meat and vegetable concoction prepared in a large cauldron, to which dried fruits, sugar and spices might be added.
Porridge or frumenty appeared in the 14th century. Eaten during the days preceding Christmas celebrations, the soup-like fasting dish contained meats, raisins, currants, prunes, wine and spices. By the 15th century, plum pottage, a soupy mix of meat, vegetables and fruit often appeared at the start of a meal.
As the 17th century opened, frumenty evolved into a plum pudding. Thickened with eggs and breadcrumbs, the addition of beer and spirits gave it more flavor and increased its shelf life. Suet gradually replaced meat in the recipe and the root vegetables disappeared.
By 1650, plum pudding had transformed from a main dish to the customary Christmas dessert. Not long afterward though, Oliver Cromwell banned plum pudding because he believed the ritual of flaming the pudding resembled pagan celebrations of the winter solstice.
George I, sometimes called the Pudding King, revived the dish in 1714 when he requested plum pudding as part of the royal feast celebrating his first Christmas in England. As a result, it regained its place in traditional holiday celebrations.
In the 1830’s it took its final cannon-ball form, made with flour, fruits, suet, sugar and spices, all topped with holly and flaming brandy. Anthony Trollope's Doctore Thorne dubbed the dish ‘Christmas Pudding’ in 1858.
Preparing plum pudding
Many households had their own ‘receipt’ (recipe) for Christmas pudding, some handed down through families for generations. Most recipes shared a set of common ingredients: finely chopped suet, currants, raisins, and other dried fruit, eggs, flour, milk, spices and brandy. These were mixed together, wrapped in a pudding cloth and boiled four or five hours.
To enhance their flavor after cooking, Christmas puddings hung on hooks to dry out for weeks prior to serving. Once dried, wrapped in alcohol-soaked cheese cloth and placed in earthenware, cooks took the puddings somewhere cool to further age. Some added more alcohol during this period and sealed the puddings with suet or wax to aid in preservation.
Plum pudding traditions
With a food so many centuries in the making, it is not surprising that many traditions have evolved around the preparation and eating of plum pudding.
The last Sunday before Advent, falling sometime between November 20th and 26th, was considered the last day to make Christmas puddings and still give them time to age properly.
It received the moniker 'Stir-up Sunday' because the opening words of the main prayer in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 for that day are:
"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."
Choir boys parodied the prayer:
"Stir up, we beseech thee, the pudding in the pot. And when we do get home tonight, we'll eat it up hot."
Tradition decrees Christmas pudding be made with thirteen ingredients to represent Christ and the twelve apostles. All family members helped in ‘stirring up’ the pudding with a special wooden spoon (in honor of Christ's crib.) The stirring had to be done clockwise, from east to west to honor the journey of the Magi, with eyes shut, while making a secret wish.
Some added tiny charms to th
e pudding. These revealed their finders’ fortune. The trinkets often included a thimble for spinsterhood or thrift, a ring for marriage, a coin for wealth, a miniature horseshoe or a tiny wishbone for good luck, a shoe for travel, and an anchor for safe harbor.
At the end of the Christmas feast, the pudding made a dramatic entrance to the dining room. With a sprig of holly on top as a reminder of Jesus’ Crown of Thorns and bathed in flaming brandy, representing the Passion of Christ and Jesus' love and power, the Christmas pudding leant a theatrical aspect to the celebration.
Why is it called plum pudding?
And the answer to the most burning question: Why call it ‘plum pudding’ when it contains no plums?
Dried plums, or prunes, were popular in pies in medieval times, but in the 16th and 17th centuries raisins replaced them. In the 17th century, plums referred to raisins or other dried fruits. The dishes made with them retain the term ‘plum’ to this day.
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For more Regency era Christmas Traditions, look for A Jane Austen Regency Christmas at your favorite online retailers or click this Amazon link.
Other books by Maria Grace:
Fine Eyes and Pert Opinions
Remember the Past
The Darcy Brothers
Given Good Principles Series:
Darcy’s Decision
The Future Mrs. Darcy
All the Appearance of Goodness
Twelfth Night at Longbourn
Jane Austen’s Dragons Series:
A Proper Introduction to Dragons
Pemberley: Mr. Darcy’s Dragon
Longbourn: Dragon Entail
Netherfield: Rogue Dragon
The Queen of Rosings Park Series:
Mistaking Her Character
The Trouble to Check Her
A Less Agreeable Man
Sweet Tea Stories:
A Spot of Sweet Tea: Hopes and Beginnings (short
story anthology)
Snowbound at Hartfield
A Most Affectionate Mother
Inspiration
Darcy Family Christmas Series
Darcy & Elizabeth: Christmas 1811
The Darcy’s First Christmas
From Admiration to Love
Regency Life (Nonfiction) Series:
A Jane Austen Christmas: Regency Christmas
Traditions
Courtship and Marriage in Jane Austen’s World
How Jane Austen Kept her Cool: An A to Z History of Georgian Ice Cream
Behind the Scene Anthologies (with Austen Variations):
Pride and Prejudice: Behind the Scenes
Persuasion: Behind the Scenes
Non-fiction Anthologies
Castles, Customs, and Kings Vol. 1
Castles, Customs, and Kings Vol. 2
Putting the Science in Fiction
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Rising Waters: Hurricane Harvey Memoirs
Lady Catherine’s Cat
A Gift from Rosings Park
Bits of Bobbin Lace
Half Agony, Half Hope: New Reflections on Persuasion
Four Days in April
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About the Author
Maria Grace has her PhD in Educational Psychology and is a 16-year veteran of the university classroom where she taught courses in human growth and development, learning, test development and counseling. None of which have anything to do with her undergraduate studies in economics/sociology/managerial studies/behavior sciences.
She has one husband and one grandson, earned two graduate degrees and two black belts, raised three sons, danced English Country dance for four years, is aunt to five nieces, is designing a sixth Regency costume, blogged seven years on Random Bits of Fascination, has outlines for eight novels waiting to be written, attended nine English country dance balls, and shared her life with ten cats.
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Acknowledgments
So many people have helped me along the journey taking this from an idea to a reality.
Jan, Ruth, Anji, Debbie and Julie thank you so much for cold reading, proof reading and being honest!
My dear friend Cathy, my biggest cheerleader, you have kept me from chickening out more than once!
And my sweet sister Gerri who believed in even those first attempts that now live in the file drawer!
Thank you!
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