Aflame

The British certainly know how to create drama. Our Christmas dinner, at the home of friends who generously invited us to share their traditional family gathering, ended with these two spectacular desserts: an English trifle, of liquor-soaked spongecake, strawberry jam, custard, and whipped cream; and a flaming Christmas pudding, which is a sort of steamed fruitcake, usually containing suet, over which brandy is poured and set aflame. Marvelous! And neither exactly trifling on the caloric front, but absolutely delicious.

Over dinner we talked about family holiday traditions. Their family always set up their tree and opened presents the night before, ate lamb for dinner, ended the meal with the desserts shown above, and took their tree down after the 12 days, at Epiphany.  Mine set up their tree a week or two in advance, ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, had fruitcake and cookies for Christmas dessert and took the tree down on New Year's Day, if not before. I've attended (and usually sung at) a midnight service on the 24th almost every year of my life... J., the son of a minister and immigrant parents, was hard-pressed to remember any family traditions at all except that they opened their presents the night before.

I felt bound by tradition for a long time, and gradually relinquished -- partly by choice, partly by necessity -- the ones I'd grown up with not only for some new ones of our own devising, but more generally a free attitude of doing whatever feels right (and convenient) in a given year. I've found that pretty liberating. At the same time I sometimes miss the long holiday table filled with family members in my grandparents' house, which would always be decorated with particular objects and marked by tradition.

That Christmas Day discussion made me think about families, and individuals, and where we all fall on the spectrum of loving/being bound by tradition, or free-forming our way through life, especially those aspects of life that are usually marked by ritual or form of some sort. Some of us find a great deal of comfort and pleasure in tradition and repetition, while the same things makes others of us downright squirrelly. It's interesting. And some of us start out one way and change, either becoming more flexible and experimental, or more settled into patterns -- sometimes not necessarily because of our own desires, but because new generations of children and grandchildren demand  or push us in one direction or the other. I say all of this not as a judgement of any particular way being "right," which of course it isn't, just as observations that traditions and ritual  -- or the lack thereof -- play a larger part in our lives than we might acknowledge, and our changing attitudes toward them throughout life have a good deal to tell us.

 

Comments

[Lilian Nattel]

What a thought provoking post. I've moved away from tradition toward something more flexible and free-flowing, partly due to children and partly my own spiritual evolution. There is still a part of me that can cry when those traditions are evoked, but on the whole the free flowing is more representative of both me and my own family.

[Beth]

Thanks for sharing your response, Lilian -- I hope other readers will do the same.

[Natalie]

Beautiful pictures, Beth, these and the previous ones.
The only constant in my family Christmas tradition was that we were rarely all in the same country or the same house at the same time. However and wherever, there was usually a Christmas tree and a Christmas meal and the opening of presents and the attending of a church service, either at midnight or on the day. I think my best Christmas memory is of one in Paraguay, when I was a child: December was summer there and our tree was plucked from the garden; I think ikt was either a small tangerine tree or a small palm tree.

A very happy year to you and Jonathan.

[Marja-Leena]

Lovely posts and photos, Beth. I grew up with the Finnish traditions as best as they could be done as immigrants, with the traditional foods and baking and a tree put up a day or two before Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was the most important, with a feast and Santa's visit. Church on Christmas Day, though not in our native language, something the adults missed a lot. In the earlier years when the extended family was all still in the same city, we'd take turns having feasts from one tiny home to another until the last one on New Year's Day. It was wonderful for all the children, and though a lot of work for the mothers, it was shared.

Then I married a German whose traditions, luckily, were similar regarding Christmas tree and Eve, and some similar foods. We've blended things up a bit, the tree goes up a little earlier, and over the years added some variations in foods but have stayed with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day feasts. Our children, now grown up, still like our traditions even though their partners come from English traditions and so they do both. The grandchildren are loving both. Blending continues...

Happy year's end, and a Happy Creative New Year to you and j.

[Fire Bird]

spectacular flaming pudding! that's one tradition we always maintain too - warm brandy in ladle over candle flame until it starts to steam a little, then rapidly hurl over Christmas pudding and apply match, while someone else turns the lights off... hope it tasted as good as it looks!

[Hattie]

I love that blue flame.