Stir up Sunday and Other Yuletide Customs

[BBMmk2]

Well yes, it's coming to that time of year again!

Mrs.BBM has already made Christmas Cake. Smelt very boozy, with brandy being fed, every now and a gain . This year MrsBBM used Mary Berry's recipe. We wait with baited breath how this one will be like. But I am sure will be enjoyed as usual.

Just thinking about other customs that happen along the way to the big day itself!

[pastoralguy]

Well, as an NHS employee, our big thing is are we working Christmas or New Year! Looks like I'm off Christmas but have to work New Year. Ah well - public holiday rates.

[DracoM]

It's usually on [yawn] The Archers.

[Ferretfancy]

I always think of Stir Up Sunday at this time of the year -"Stir up we beseech thee oh Lord!"

At boarding school in the late forties,the boarders were invited to stir the pud, which was in a huge bowl with big wooden spoons. The trick was to roll up your sleeve and let the side of your hand slide down the handle to scoop up a nice dollop of pudding mixture. All this was presided over by a benevolent Mr Bumble who turned a blind eye. I wonder how those expensive ingredients were acquired during that time of post war austerity, but they brought a delicious result.

I'm not making a pudding this year, as I still have a fine one from last year. It will be nicely matured!

[Lat-Literal]

I always go back to my childhood next door neighbours in the sixties, the Cables, whose decorations stood out from the rest, being natural from their garden and the woodland above us, occasionally subtly sprayed. Visits there were not necessarily easy going - she talked non stop while he who was then his late seventies just wanted to smoke his pipe in the absence of visitors. In truth, I probably preferred the colourful tinsel and basic daisy chains above our black and white television and elsewhere. But I did "get" from an early age their earlier connections that were more elemental. By my twenties, nostalgia said to me that they had lived in a "white ranch house" which sounds almost old American. It was certainly different from ours, closer to a self-made mobile home these days, albeit on its own plot. They were there before almost any housing here existed, just 15 miles from Charing Cross.

Their steep hill of a garden below the trees and ours was the same, the vista I see now from my living room today although that may be about to change. It was a proper garden. I learned most of my flower names from Mrs C. The only kitsch part was an ornamental dog. There is a photo of me straddling it in which I look as uneasy as the one which shows me on a horse at the village fete. The latter had a mind of its own while the former was still and metal but uncomfortable around the bollocks. Anyhow, this year, I may go back to the local church for Rutter's Requiem because I was surprised at just how good the opera event was there in the Summer. Oddly, I keep confusing Rutter with Stainer. Stainer is more me because he is a Southwark bloke which I am if only by proxy. But Rutter's cool. That church has taken on a different dimension to me now I alone know it is on the mystic triangle.

[Lat-Literal]

There is a bit more.

I suppose the lead-up to Christmas has connotations with my university days. I had been in work for a year which most of my new mates hadn't, hence I was slightly older than them but I was younger in spirit. Shereen and I communicated by letter and it was not without humour. That wasn't necessarily a good thing. I was open minded racially but she wanted in the longer term a tall, black man. On 24th December 1981, I had left my van at home in the snow so that we could have a lot of fun and stay on the right side of the law. I was not rewarded for my sense of responsibility. On my return, the milk float had collided into it, smashing it to smithereens. Twenty years later a milk float collided into my father's vehicle at exactly the same spot. I blamed his late father who he adored beyond rational duty. When a milkman he himself handed in his notice once the horses had taken over him and his cart.

York was a very different world. For the first time ever, I played snowballs and didn't get upset when one hit me in the face. Most had girlfriends but they were many miles away. It was meant that I should have fallen in with that crowd and had "the all male experience". It wasn't meant to live that a lifetime but one day we must become analytical on some people's difficulties with civvy street. I do recall the whisky or whiskey. Obviously I don't want to upset the Scots or the Irish so I am being fair here. We drank a lot of beer and actually not a great deal of the heavy stuff but it was very much there conceptually. A warm glow against the ice on the northern roads, just past Jimmy's with his fish, chips and meat and potato pies. There was no connotation with the mouth or the gullet but then there had never been with other drink - or food. It was all ideas beyond the boring body. I would say that was heading towards Christmas. I can't stand watching all the food and drink programmes on the television today. They are enough to give the most stable anorexia.

[Dave2002]

It's usually on [yawn] The Archers.

Did it even exist before The Archers? [another yawn...]

[P. G. Tipps]

Well yes, it's coming to that time of year again!

Mrs.BBM has already made Christmas Cake. Smelt very boozy, with brandy being fed, every now and a gain . This year MrsBBM used Mary Berry's recipe. We wait with baited breath how this one will be like. But I am sure will be enjoyed as usual.

Just thinking about other customs that happen along the way to the big day itself!

Customs are changing rapidly, Bbm! These days the Baby Messiah is not quite what He was apparently ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41997936/greggs-sorry-for-swapping-jesus-for-sausage-roll-in-nativity-scene

Roll on Christmas, eh ? (sorry!)

Enjoy that cake on the day, Bbm, I can almost smell the brandy from here ..

[Lat-Literal]

It is at this time of year that I long to be 70 with 15 additional years of life experience behind me rather than 55 and goodness knows what ahead. I should never have got into bed with 22 year old pirate radio people at 7 but rather found a greater emotional association with people of my own age. How anyone old can be jealous of the young I really can't comprehend. Those who are only 40 now haven't even got to this point yet. How old was Jesus when he left this planet? Just 30-something and not with a Muslim in Tescos in sight. I do like Christmas. That is why I have bought a proper tree for the past seven years along with the false implication I have wealth. I am aware that it has been a friendly act of rebellion given that we could only bring out the same plastic one each year when I was young for reasons of tidiness and poverty. I suppose I am a victim of austerity although not as much as my parents in the era when people could finally acquire a mortgage thereby aggravating those who said it was a noose around the neck. Like holidays to Thailand are for the young, it isn't affordable so it has become an absolute necessity. If I am going to embrace the Victorians, I have to prove to no one in particular that I can look like a very rich one.

Luckily, I have now experienced 50 odd years of the strange rotary organization on our streets. From the word go, when their vehicle wasn't as captivating as the vegetable van driven by an imaginary Grocer Jack, they didn't manage to equal other folk. But I would still miss them if they didn't turn up with a peculiar tape of carols recorded in 1933, a man half dressed as Father Christmas and their money boxes a-jangling. Mostly, I associate them with a moment in my twenties when I was coming back from an office lunch and their santa chased me down a very long street before insisting on a donation. I bought my first tree for a little girl so that she could see beauty but all she did was throw her favourite toy at it and laugh. She was deeply troubled as was her mother and I learnt quickly that emotionally I was the last person in the world to provide solutions for what had been years for them with a violent father and husband. He, though, never stole my idea of Christmas from me via them. Someday if and when my own parents have gone, I will have a multicultural one in which bright young people wearing headscarves are able to feel fully included, even if it means that I have to provide a vegetarian meal. By then I will have a long white beard and the reddest of faces. If necessary they will be there with resuscitation devices to save me. It would be better than any counselling services which these days just talk of doing deals.

[BBMmk2]

Customs are changing rapidly, Bbm! These days the Baby Messiah is not quite what He was apparently ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41997936/greggs-sorry-for-swapping-jesus-for-sausage-roll-in-nativity-scene

Roll on Christmas, eh ? (sorry!)

Enjoy that cake on the day, Bbm, I can almost smell the brandy from here ..

I saw that too, PG!

I do miss a good true family time, these days.

[BBMmk2]

Well, as an NHS employee, our big thing is are we working Christmas or New Year! Looks like I'm off Christmas but have to work New Year. Ah well - public holiday rates.

I remember when I was working for the NHS, if my rosta said I was on that shift, I was. The worst one was the late shift! Yuk! Did'nt mind the morning one though. that was fun!

[Ferretfancy]

I will be doing my voluntary job at London Zoo on Boxing Day, and there will probably be only two of us on duty. It's always very busy because families like to get out on the 26th, so it should be enjoyable for a few hours.

[P. G. Tipps]

Well, as an NHS employee, our big thing is are we working Christmas or New Year! Looks like I'm off Christmas but have to work New Year. Ah well - public holiday rates.

You're comparatively lucky ... some shop workers might have to work both, maybe even at normal pay-rates!

Ah well, when was life ever fair ... ?

[BBMmk2]

Indeed PG. Thankfully those days have passed me!

[Serial_Apologist]

You're comparatively lucky ... some shop workers might have to work both, maybe even at normal pay-rates!

Ah well, when was life ever fair ... ?

It's more to do with the fact that USDAW isn't that effective a trade union than anything to do with life being fair or unfair. For one thing it isn't easy to organise solidarity between shop workers for all sorts of reasons; for another they're not in any case all in USDAW.