Since Victorian times, British families have been gathering together on the last Sunday before Advent to get into the Christmas spirit and make a pudding for the big day. While it isn’t as widespread today as it was then, there's still a core group of passionate home bakers who celebrate Stir-up Sunday every year, a day when they'll make the best figgy pudding they can.
Even if the children are already writing their letters to Santa and the shops are fit to bursting with decorations, selection boxes and novelty festive gifts, it can seem a bit overeager to be in the kitchen preparing something that won’t be eaten for five weeks. But a good Christmas pudding needs time to mature; for the dried fruit to absorb the booze and all the flour, sugar and spices to come together and develop that wonderfully chewy, dense texture. Plus, with all those spuds to peel, turkey to baste and table places to set, it’s nice to have a made-from-scratch pudding that just needs steaming whilst everyone tucks into the main course. But why is there a specific day devoted to making Christmas pudding, and why are there so many customs and traditions associated with it?
Victorian Britain was a much more religious society than today, with nearly everyone attending church and the custom of exchanging gifts reserved for the wealthy. On the last Sunday before Advent began, churchgoers would be read to from the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, which begins ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’. Families were already creating the mixtures for their Christmas puddings (which were made popular by Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert) around this time as they took roughly five weeks to mature, so the two eventually became connected and the Sunday before Advent became known as Stir-up Sunday.
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Stir-up Sunday: a very Victorian Christmas