Plum pudding was one of the Christmas Eve traditions I enjoyed with my family when I was young. I remember my mom picking up suet from the butcher, the dried and candied fruit from the grocer, and the rum from the liquor store the week before Christmas.

When we returned home the house had a wonderful smell of cinnamon and spices. We sat in the living room by the light of the Christmas tree, waiting for my mom to bring the flaming cake into the room.


My mom decided we needed to bring this tradition back, and I think it will be one we continue for years to come with EJ.

Here is a wonderful passage in Dicken's A Christmas Carole that brilliantly describes the plum pudding tradition...

Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone – too nervous to bear witnesses – to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose – a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell 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-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.