Woman's Hour - Making and Breaking Christmas Traditions

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

Christmas is steeped in all sorts of tradition – but it’s not just trees, tinsel and turkey. Many families have their own festive rituals and the mere idea of doing things differently would make it feel… well, just not like Christmas. But why do we get so hung up on doing Christmas a certain way - even if it doesn't make us happy? What is it about human psychology that makes tradition so attractive? And if your family festivities make you want to run away and hide, what’s the best way to break the cycle?Jenni Murray talks to Dr Cristine Legare from the University of Texas at Austin about why rituals are an inevitable part of being human, and also to listeners about their stories of change at Christmas - including starting new traditions with a baby and the family forced to break tradition thanks to a kitchen fire and a large dog...If there’s one thing that most people expect on Christmas Day, it’s a Christmas dinner. From turkey and pigs in blankets to brussels sprouts and bread sauce it's a meal that many cooks dread. But according to historian Dr Annie Gray, it doesn't have to be that way. She says that if you take the long view, the only common thread from pre-Christian winter festivals to today is ‘light fire, eat meat, get drunk.’ The actual food is completely negotiable. She also explains why we cram so much food into one day, and what social history reveals about why mum generally cooks while dad gets to carve the turkey.To top off this festive feast, Jenni is joined by the Glasgow-based close harmony quartet The All Sorts with a pick-and-mix of songs both traditional - and a little bit different.Presenter - Jenni Murray Producer - Anna LaceyInterviewed guest - Cristine Legare Interviewed guest - Annie Gray Interviewed guest - Sarah Shorter Interviewed guest - Barbara Cole Walton Interviewed guest - Amy Batalli Interviewed guest - Adele Mitchinson Interviewed guest - Louella Miles

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good morning and I hope you're all enjoying the merriest of Christmases. The turkey's in, the roasties are ready to join it and the sprouts are all prepared. Or are they? What traditions will you be following or maybe breaking this year? What is it about traditions that so delights some of us and infuriates others? And how did it all start? Dr Annie Gray on the history of the turkey, the cranberry sauce and the plum pudding.

I do have little doubt though that the Christmas tree lights are twinkling and the halls have been decked deck the halls with boughs of holly tis the season to be jolly fa la la la la la la la dawn ring our gay opero fa la la la la la la la trow the ancient yuletide carol fa la la la la la la la la And there'll be more music from the all sorts throughout today's programme.

Now, some time ago, we asked you about the kind of Christmas you would be having this year. Would you be sticking with the usual plan? Stockings in the morning, presents before lunch, a blowout cooked by the mother of the house, the bird carved by the father, and then flop in front of the Queen. Or will it be a complete departure from the familiar? Well, Adele Mitchinson contacted us from Newcastle and joins us from there. Amy Vitale wrote to us from Surrey and she's in our studio in Guildford. Amy I know your family introduced a new tradition why did you do it? Well I think the first thing for us was that my mother sadly passed away and Christmas Eve suddenly became an evening where there felt like there was a bit of a gap that there hadn't been before and so we started a new tradition in light of that. And how did it work? It was quite a simple

thing to begin with. My brother and I went out for a meal and as time went on it increased and more and more family members began to come along to it. And why has it not happened this year? Well I think it overgrew in a way as we've all grown up and have families of our own the number increased to sort of 18 to 20 people and that comes with many more people that have decisions that they'd like made about their Christmas Eves and we just can't seem to make it fit with what everybody wants to keep as a Christmas Eve tradition. And how sad is it for you all to have it ruined by new people coming into the family and wanting something else? I think it's really tricky, isn't it? I think when you lose a tradition it's almost like losing

a member of the family you kind of feel all of the feelings you have associated with with the grief you have sort of the resentment for some of the new people and their traditions a sadness that it's gone and also a little bit of embarrassment of oh have I been pushing this on people for longer than they've wanted it now Adele I know you have a new baby 10 months old Charlotte what sort of traditions are you trying to create for her well one of the most important things for me was Christmas cake so every year when I was a little girl I used to sit down with my mother and we used to make a lovely Christmas cake and my key job at the end was to mix in all the fruit give it a good stir and make a wish and we would pop that in the oven usually September I've left it a little bit late this year and that was our tradition and over the years you know there know, there's been gaps where there hasn't been any Christmas cake,

and when I was about 19, I started to do it myself, and I've had some very bad ones in between, but with Charlotte this year, it was really important for me to do that, and while she's 10 months old and really doesn't have a clue what's going on, the spoon's still there i still give it a stir with her and you know you know told her to make a wish and and that's going to be the start of our very important christmas cake making because there was a lack of christmas tradition in your family because of your parents separating wasn't there what happened then when when they separated so while uh that was obviously,

it does make a massive difference from everything that you've, you know, I've known people that have had families that stay together and you have the same thing year in and year out. And when they did separate, what that meant was I was open to lots more different families, friends. We went, I've been all over, I've been out for lunch, in for lunch.

We've had, we've shared families with other families, with new partners of my parents. So it's been a vast and a huge experience, which I think has made me more adaptable to other people's family traditions. I think sometimes traditions, while they're fantastic, can be almost like a bit of a worry of, well, we haven't done it that way this year, then everything's ruined. So I think I've become a lot more adaptable. It makes the times of the Christmases that I had with my parents very special, but it also meant that I had to see

humongous amounts of range from all different areas across the north and how they do Christmas as well. But generally, from both of you, why are traditions important to us all? Amy, what would you say? I think it's just that familiarity that we like to have in things. As humans, we like to know certain things are going to happen. And particularly with traditions,

I think you put your rose-tinted glasses on and remember all the good times about them. And so you look forward to those things because you've forgotten in a year's time some of the things that maybe didn't work for you quite so well. And Adele, why do you think they're important? I think you hit the nail on the head there. That's an excellent point.

We are used to our traditions in terms of we like the repetitiveness of it. And it is a great way to cover over anything that you kind of want to brush under the carpet. But it's like a warm blanket, isn't it? It's doing the same thing and passing that on to the generations uh you know something i did with my mother that my mother would have done with her mother i can then do with charlotte and hopefully then she can continue that however she sees fit in the future well thank you both very much for the moment as we've heard from adele and amy we may do things at christmas the way we've always done them, following exactly the pattern our parents created for us, or something may happen, the loss of a loved one,

or the arrival of a new baby, which makes us start a whole new thing. But why is breaking a family tradition often really quite traumatic? Why can it cause such a ding-dong if mum insists presents should be opened before lunch and dad says no it's after lunch and what do you do if you love a Christmas pudding and a rich rum sauce and nobody else in the family can stand it why does tradition matter and how if you have to do you cope with change well Christine Laguerre is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Christine, Adele talked about the tradition of making Christmas cake with her mother and then passing that on to her daughter. You could eat fruit cake really at

any time of the year, but the cake is now part of the Christmas ritual. Why do we do these things that seem to have almost no point, like stirring the Christmas pudding and making a wish, for instance? A lot of the aspects of a ritual, a lot of the components of different ritual practices are not about achieving a particular outcome or goal. A lot of ritual is what I would call opaque. So it isn't clear from a causal perspective why all of these different components of preparing a recipe, for example, are required. But in many ways, that's kind of the point. It's not so much that all of these things are required for achieving a particular causal outcome. It's that all of these things, activities bind us together as a group.

So what rituals do is they give you a shared set of activities to do together. In some ways, it doesn't matter what those particular activities are, as long as everybody does them in a particular way. This creates the high fidelity transmission of these activities over time, it creates continuity. So there's something very comforting about doing the same things together every year. This is true in the context of something like Christmas. This is true in the context of sports teams, of all kinds of different organizations, having these shared practices that we do together over time, bond groups together. And that's really what we're craving. We're craving a sense of shared identity, a sense of shared purpose over time. So in many ways, it's not a problem that some of these activities are not strictly necessary.

But how does he keep on continuing year after year and babies picking up on them right away? I mean, Charlotte now knows about stirring the Christmas pudding and making a wish. Rituals have been designed by human cultures to perpetuate the longevity and the practices. I mean, in some cases, the power of groups. So the whole point of ritual, in fact, is high fidelity, transmission and conformity. You see this in the case of organized religions. You see these practices that have been transmitted and have been perpetuated, in some cases for thousands of years. So rituals all about high fidelity, transmission, imitation, in many cases,

you mentioned young children, even babies picking up on these things, and resisting individual level innovation and change. What about when the rituals change? We had an email from Karen who said that she and her husband will be in Australia for his work this year. And she feels like a bad parent, even though their children are in their 20s and are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. Why do we all find that kind of change so difficult and feel so guilty about it? Because rituals associated with Christmas, for example, are synonymous with family identity, and not celebrating, but embracing new professional opportunities. But it also means that they're not, you know, young children anymore, that they have their own families. So changing those rituals is associated with a change in family structure,

which there can be loss and sadness associated with that. Now, Christmas isn't the only festival celebrated at this time of year. There's Chanukah, there's Pantaganapati, there's Yule. To what extent do different religions have similar rituals that appear at this time? I would say there's probably a lot of world religions that celebrate different holidays at this season. And they have different significance. They represent different religious beliefs, obviously. But there's also a lot of traditions associated with the new year. So I think some of these, the traditions that occur at this time of year have religious

significance, and some have to do with the changing of seasons, with the start of a new year. Rituals are really useful as transitions, as family transitions, social transitions. In fact, there are rituals associated with every major life event. So in all human cultures, they celebrate the rituals surrounding birth, surrounding puberty, for example, surrounding marriage, surrounding death. All of these major consequential life events have rituals associated with them. So it's not just these shared social events, holidays that have rituals, but we ritualize pretty much everything that's important to us as people. What role do women tend to play in the maintenance of traditions and rituals? We had one email from Maddy who said she'd read that women's family traditions always tend to dominate and men's get set aside.

I think the reason for that in the context of something like Christmas expectation that women take care of family-related things, and it would follow that rituals associated with family, Christmas would be a great example of that. It's very much about togetherness as a family. In some ways, it's not surprising that women would be tasked with maintaining a lot more of those traditions and have a lot more of those responsibilities. I think it's exclusively because of the association with family. There are other types of rituals that men tend to be more responsible for. The more associated with the family it is, the more often it's associated with women's responsibilities and roles. And if you're someone who doesn't enjoy family traditions,

what do you do about it without offending the entire family? I think that requires some negotiation. I think it's useful to step back and think through what the objective of these activities are. We often get so caught into particular cultural scripts surrounding holidays of this sort, and we lose track of what the actual function, what the point of it is. So I think, you know, having conversations with with family about what aspects of these traditions are not enjoyable, or maybe not working for everyone, would be a good place to start. Because often we get so wrapped up in these things, we forget, what are we,

what actually is this for? This is supposed to be a warm time of family togetherness. Maybe we don't need to saddle the family with 15 different activities per day and all of these different things that maybe aren't working for our family now. Or maybe they worked in the past and don't work as well as people change, as family structures change. So having those conversations with families, I think, would be really helpful. So maybe I have to give up on the Christmas pudding because nobody else in my family likes it. Christine Laguerre, Amy Batali and Adele Mitchinson, thank you all very much indeed for joining us this morning. Now, still to come in today's festive feast of a programme, what will be on your lunchtime table?

Traditional or something a bit different? And how did all those traditions begin? Dr Annie Gray on the history of the turkey, the Brussels sprouts and the pudding. And the serial episode three of Kilvert's Diary. And don't forget if you ever miss the live Woman's Hour

you can catch up by downloading the BBC Sounds app. All you have to do is search for Woman's Hour and you'll find all of our episodes. Click on an episode to listen straight away or you can catch up by downloading the BBC Sounds app. All you have to do is search for Woman's Hour and you'll find all of our episodes. Click on an episode to listen straight away or you can download for later. And by the way, you may have missed Joanna Scanlon in yesterday's programme talking about Dracula.

Now, I have no doubt Father Christmas came to your house last night if you have children at home. But did he come to visit the all sorts? Bring me some toys Bring Merry Christmas To all girls and boys And every night I'll go to sleep singing And dream about the presents You'll be bringing Santa

Promise me please Give every reindeer A hug and a squeeze I'll be good as good can be Mr. Santa, don't forget me Mr. Santa, dear old St. Nick Oh, please be awful careful Not to get sick Put on your coat and side

When breezes are blowing And when you cross the street Look where you're going Santa We love you so We hope you never Get lost in the snow We've been good as good can be

Mr Father Christmas please, please, please Mr Santa don't forget me The all sorts made up of Grace Wayne, Jane Monari, Sarah Shorter and Barbara Walton. Barbara, how much do you actually enjoy this time of year as singers?

Because you don't always get a lot of variety of subject matter, I suspect. I have not found that being a singer makes Christmas any less exciting for me, although I know it does some of my colleagues. I have been a huge fan of Christmas my whole life, often starting singing Christmas songs in September. My mum had to make a no Christmas till after Halloween rule to get through the fall. And Tara, what about you? I am definitely of the opinion that you can have too much of a good thing. But I don't know, I come from a singing background that's much more choral based. So you do Christmas as a job much more regularly for much, much longer.

And you end up feeling as though you're having to sell something. And that always sort of decreases your personal enjoyment of it when you're on your 20th hour of carol singing and your audience is still, oh, this is so magical. And you're just like, I've kind of had enough of this by now. I mean, carols, the same thing over and over again every year. Barbara, are you sure you love it? Well, I mean, to be honest, I haven't had as much of a choral background. So that's not so much been an issue for me. My Christmas list is more full of Kelly Clarkson and, I don't know, Sia.

Less carols. So I don't have the same issue many other singers have. How common is it to find an all-female barbershop quartet? Quite rare, I think. I think when there is one, they're more likely to sort of dress up in 1950s, 60s and do Andrew's sister style choreography. And often have a big band behind them, which we don't. Yeah, or just be doing that sort of older stuff.

And obviously we sang Mr. Santa, but we do classical arrangements and we do musical theatre arrangements and we do folk arrangements. And so we have a sort of quite a rare broad selection of music I think. And are you always a cappella you never have a big band behind you? Oh no we're always just us more economical that way. Well just us so far has been absolutely delightful and you will sing again for us i think towards the end of the program so thank you all sorts very much all of you now you've had an hour of listening to woman's hour

but on this day of all days a woman's work is not yet done there will of course be some men who've taken on the cooking of the Christmas dinner but whoever is responsible it will for most of us be the traditional fare the turkey the sprouts the bread sauce cranberry sauce roast potatoes and in my case Christmas pudding but not that of the rest of my family but whilst we like to think it's all tradition is it really how far back do these habits go well dr annie gray is a food historian and cook annie i know you're not a fan of the traditional christmas dinner why not uh well i think it's uh suffice to say that if we really like turkey we would eat it more than once a year um for me as a food historian i suppose because i look back at the broad swathe of history, I see what our Christmas dinner has been throughout the centuries.

And turkey's really quite a newcomer. I'm not fond of it personally. I think that it is a dry bird. I think that, yes, it can be fantastic, but it's very large. And there's a lot of social pressure as well to have it. And I suppose as a natural rebel, I kind of kick back against that and say, but no, actually for two, three hundred years, our traditional quote unquote Christmas dinner has been more likely to be

beef and plum pudding. And I love that you like Christmas pudding because for me, that's one of the true joys. And that should be the thing on the table in as far as there should be anything there. But it's to be eaten with the beef. It's something that should be loved with the meat, not just as an afterthought at the end of dinner. Because traditionally it wasn't as sweet as it would be now. No, not at all. And plum pudding, and it was plum pudding, not Christmas pudding before the 1840s,

is one of those things that was eaten really throughout the winter months. So much of what we regard today as Christmas fare really wasn't in the past. It was just seasonal. It was in season in the winter. It was rich. It was difficult to get hold of of and therefore it became associated with partying in particular over the Christmas period so in the medieval era that was 12 days and as it went forward it dwindled but plum pudding was one of those things that was eaten throughout the winter and it was quintessentially British the plum pudding and the roast beef of old England those were the things that were had at pretty much any party.

And by the 18th century, they were so synonymous with Christmas that French, in particular, commentators were saying, there is not a single table in Britain that is not furnished with plum pudding and roast beef. I mean, they might have been over-egging the pudding slightly. I suspect the poor were not eating plum pudding and roast beef, but they were designed to be eaten together. The plum pudding was less sweet, as you say. And actually, they do work. If you think of the flavors in a plum pudding a Christmas

pudding a really good one they should be more like chutney that rich fruity spiciness and if you have just I would challenge every listener to today to go out find themselves some beef and have a sandwich made with roast beef plum pudding a little a little bit of salt, a tiny bit of gravy. That to me sums up two or three hundred years worth of Christmas and it's sublime. I'm still surprised at the recent arrival of the turkey. What brought the turkey in? Well it's very big and it tastes nicer than peacock. That's really it in a nutshell. So the turkey as most people will know is a new world bird it was discovered by the Spanish when they started to colonize Spanish America they thought it was very impressive it was very big it lent itself to feasting if you chop the head and breast off a turkey keep the feathers on

and the wings on the tail and you dry them out you can put them in a pie and they look amazing sticking out of a pie so really spectacular and that's what used to happen to a peacock and also a swan both of which were also really very traditional Christmas birds so when the turkey came back to Europe it sort of came in immediately as this big winter feast bird very much in season over winter and you watch it spread you watch it spread from Spain up through France where they were breeding turkeys by the 1530s into Britain where it's mentioned in sumptuary laws by the 1540s and it becomes this winter christmas bird but it's one among many many many things on a rich person's table for many hundreds of years and it is associated with christmas but only because

it's in season um what really changes is during the victorian era that becomes a sort of there's much more emphasis on christmas and christ Christmas Day in particular so all the foods that were once eaten as feast foods throughout the winter slowly become concentrated more and more and more on one day and Mrs Beaton in her book of household management talks about Christmas the middle classes of this empire wouldn't be a Christmas without the sight of a portly paterfamilias carving his own fat turkey and carving it well. A little tear there. But even she puts roast beef on the menu, not just turkey. How did this idea that it's the man's job to carve come about?

Well, it's a gentlemanly pursuit. So carving was always seen as something that a gentleman did. All the way through the 17th century, the 18th century, the man would stand at one end of the table and his wife at the other end of the table, and they were the two most important positions, and the man would stand at one end of the table and his wife at the other end of the table and they were the two most important positions and the man would carve and there was there were kind of gendered table ends really as well so if you looked at some tables the man would have in front of him farmed meats and dark soups things like hair soup or kidney soup and a lot of big

beasts to carve and the woman might have a chicken or perhaps something that was very light and very sweet because naturally we women are incredibly genteel and suited to white and and cute meats that reflect our innate gentility it's that kind of thing so so the man carved because it was a gentleman's pursuit and that devolved slowly to the butler so in the victorian period the butler would carve and then eventually sort of the last vestiges of it are left today where usually the woman does all the cooking and the slaving over the hot stove, brings out the turkey or whatever other meat there is only for her husband or other man to go, oh, I'll carve it. How did the assumption that the woman would cook come about? I mean, we know, as I said, there are some men now who will be cooking like crazy, but, it does still tend to be women. Yeah, the statistics are that in around 40% to 50% of households, it is women doing all of the work.

And there's another 10% to 20% where the husbands also share the workload or some of the children. So it is still very imbalanced. I mean, women have long been associated with food preparation right back into the long, long distant past. But you find that within houses that don't have servants in particular the bulk of the cooking the bulk of the the domestic work has always fallen to the woman so when you look again at the kind of household mrs beaton was

aiming out with her portly peter familias actually most of the people who bought her book wouldn't have had their own servants they'd have been doing their own work and that meant the mistress of the house doing the cooking perhaps the daily char or some form of very youthful maid if she was lucky to help her out. So that idea that a woman's work was the cooking was the domestic side, was looking after the household, was very, very ingrained by the Victorian era and it just got worse. By the time you got to 20th century and servants were becoming much more difficult to get hold of, women were being pushed into the household after both world wars because, of course, they'd come out and then got pushed back in again.

So that idea that that's what the women did was very ingrained. And at Christmas, I think it's worse. I mean, previous contributors have talked about the rituals around Christmas and the way in which their Christmases pan out. And it's particularly so at Christmas that we seem to retreat to quite old-fashioned customs. And one of those certainly is this idea that mum will get up at four o'clock in the morning and put the turkey in the oven.

We have of course had a number of emails telling us about breaking traditions and I just want us to talk to Luella Miles who got in touch with us to tell us about how her husband set the kitchen on fire. Luella, what happened? Well, it wasn't Christmas Eve. It was earlier on in December. And I was in bed at the time, due to be going out to our jazz band's Christmas dinner, which I'd arranged. And he knocked on the door and he said i think we've got a small problem and it turned out that the dog had had a dicky tummy and what you do for a

dog with a dicky tummy is cook them chicken and rice on a very very low light and he put the empty bowl back on the hob not realizing it was still lit, went back into the living room and the rest is history. And it just sort of went up the wall, down the oven, down the floor, onto the dishwasher, onto the worktops. When he opened the door, the smell was really horrible. And we ended up having to call the gas people out later on in the night he put the fire out thank god didn't even have to call the fire brigade out but we i smelt gas at about 11 o'clock and realized that the the fire had burnt off the knobs on the cooker as well. So I ended up outside in my dressing gown to the guest people with them going, don't put the torch on, it'll all blow up.

And it was all the dog's fault, obviously. I bet the dog got the blame, didn't it? Absolutely. So what did you do about not having a kitchen? Well, by the time we got to Christmas, the insurance people, bless them, had delivered an oven and a dishwasher. But the kitchen was in such a state

that you really didn't want to be in it. So the pub where we had been meant to go for the band's Christmas dinner we ended up being squeezed in there on Christmas Eve bless them and on Christmas Day we had

scrambled eggs and croissants cooked in the microwave and then we had Chinese takeaway later on and it was the best christmas we've ever had there was no pressure nobody had to cook it was nobody had to cook yeah i'm going to repeat it again this year thank you so much for getting in touch with us uh and telling us that very unfortunate story which actually had a happy ending, really. Just one other question about changing things, Annie. How best do you cope with a family like Philippa's, she got in touch,

where there's gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance, and a vegan daughter? I would say you either go down the pub, where they are well used to catering for various intolerances and it's completely no hassle and somebody else does the washing up. Or you could do an everybody bring a dish Christmas. I did it one year. Because of the fact that I love food generally and I don't see Christmas as anything different to any other day of the year, particularly in terms of that.

Every day should be a feast day. I once did an everybody bring a dish because I got fed up with the one who had to plan everything and it was absolutely fabulous we did mutton and caper sauce we did a random panettone we did hustle back potatoes and then we all got drunk so I would say if people are going to have intolerances which may or may not be lifestyle choices let's face it in this day and age then surely the challenge should be to them to say this is something brilliant that I love that suits me and also it has the advantage of shutting up the rest of the family if they're

moaning about them now there is a Christmas cake on our table here and there is a traditional game that can be played with a Christmas cake well this is a 12th cake um one of my I suppose bug bears at this time of the year is the fact that the traditional fruitcake seems to be disappearing. I love fruitcake, have it all throughout the year. But the Christmas cake is an oddly misplaced thing these days. People don't know when to eat it. Is it a Christmas Day thing?

Do you have people over? Do you cut it when they come over? If you do cut it when they come over, what happens if someone more important comes over and you've already cut the cake? So I think what we should all do is go back to what happened before the victorian era when we had a thing called 12th cake and a lot of customs still have it so if you go to france you see the galette de hoire there's a king cake in spain and so on and so forth so the 12th cake was a rich fruit cake and um up until the victorian era it was

sometimes known as a bean cake as well and the idea was that you had tokens hidden inside the cake, or sometimes you played a card game, which meant that you picked cards out of a hat, usually with scurrilous rhymes written on them. But in this case, we've gone back to the 17th century, so we've inserted certain tokens inside the cake, and whichever one you find will be you for the rest of the evening. So if I cut the cake cake since it's over here

we'll see what we all find i'll cut slices for the all sorts as well so you can see what you're going to be represented by this christmas all right so the knife is going in oh it's quite tough cake it's a very tough cake it doesn't want want to be cut. It really doesn't. All right. Come on then. Give me whatever is in there. I don't know if you've... Oh, you might have.

Hang on, let me pass you that. We used to do it with sixpences when I was little. Well, the sixpences sort of come out of this ritual because once the Twelfth Cake dies a death in the Victorian era, that kind of idea of hiding things inside the cake gets a bit lost. So I think people start to put sixpences in the Christmas pudding. Might this be a bean that I've got? Well, you're the king in that case. The bean king. Well, of course. So tell me what other things would come out.

Well, you've got a forked stick. That's for the cuckold. You've got a pea, which will be for the queen. You have a rag for the slut, and that's the 17th century meaning of slut, so just a slatternly character. There's a clove, and that's for the knave. I'll give you another slice there. They're not

going to be able to sing, so we are passing it over. Please don't eat it until you've done the final song peeps once recalled rigging it so that a friend of his who he knew was fiddling the treasury got the clove and they all knew that he was the knave so there are all sorts of places you can go with this well dr annie gray thank you so much for being with us this morning and we have had a number of emails about leaving tradition behind evans lydia said my parents got divorced two years ago which makes these sorts of times of

year when the emphasis is on one big happy family and being together emotionally charged and raw my brother has just moved to japan so we had christmas day in november before he left and mum and i are going to Morocco purposefully where Christmas isn't even celebrated and then Helen Kidd said not giving into the pressure to spend it uncomfortably with family I don't always get on with this year and then Mim Paulette said it's becoming less and less important we're trying to buy less waste less and live and love more and we've had a number of texts and tweets on the question of food um acnc says no stupid turkey it's a day to try any yummy food uh liz said sods living over the dinner booked booked to go for a curry instead. And Betsy said, been invited to the Outlaws for the first time in 15 years.

First year I'm not cooking dinner. Well, thank you to Dr. Annie Gray. Thank you to Christine Laguerre, Amy Batali, Adele Mitchinson, and of course, Luella Miles and her dog. And in the tradition of not doing things quite the traditional way we'll have the all sorts in a

moment. But have a wonderful Christmas day. Join me again tomorrow for Boxing Day. All sorts. Away you go. My love is like a red red All sorts. Away you go. Love is like a melody that's sweetly played in tune. So fair is thy body, lass, so dear in love am I and I will love thee still

my dear till all the seas can dry till all the seas can dry my dear till all

the seas gang dry. And I will love thee still, my dear, Till all the seas gang dry. My dear, the sounds of my child And fare thee well, my only love And fare thee well, O while And I will come again, my love, though twere ten thousand mile. Though twere ten thousand mile, my love, though twere ten thousand mile. I love the 12,000 mile And I will come again, my love The 12,000 mile I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year,

I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.