Where Stir-up Sunday Came From

The story as it is told

On the last Sunday before Advent, in kitchens across Britain, the whole family is called to the table. The pudding has been waiting for this: thirteen ingredients in the bowl, one for Christ and one for each of the twelve apostles, just as the Church is said to have ordered in the Middle Ages.

Everyone takes the spoon in turn. They must stir from east to west, the direction the Magi travelled to find the child, and each person makes a wish as they stir. Some families drop in a silver coin, and whoever finds it on Christmas Day has good luck for the year.

The date, the thirteen, the direction and the decree all arrive together, as one old rule handed down from the Middle Ages, and a family stirring a bowl in a modern kitchen is taking part in it.

What we can confirm

The name comes from a prayer. In the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, the collect (the short set prayer) for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity begins: "Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded." The same words already appear for that Sunday in the first English Prayer Book of 1549. In practice it is read on the last Sunday before Advent, so the day falls in late November.

The kitchen joke came later. In 1830 Robert Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, published five years after his death, defined "STIR-UP-SUNDAY" as "the last Sunday after Trinity," named for the collect. He called the nickname "very irreverent" and said housewives took it as a reminder to start "mixing the ingredients of their mince-pies." His food is mince pies, not pudding.

The pudding appears in John Brand's Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, in the edition revised by Sir Henry Ellis and published by Henry Bohn in 1849 (reprinted 1853). A bracketed note says schoolboys call the day Stir-up Sunday and "repeat the following lines, without considering its irreverent application":

"Stir up, we beseech thee, The pudding in the pot: And when we get home, We'll eat it all hot."

Our search of the 1813 edition's text found no Stir-up Sunday entry.

By the 1870s stirring the pudding was a family scene in magazines. Harper's Weekly printed an engraving titled "Stirring the Christmas pudding" in its supplement of December 30, 1876 (Library of Congress).

The "medieval decree" is another matter. In 2012 the food historian Ivan Day traced the 13-ingredient, east-to-west claim back through an academic book to Simon Callow's unreferenced Dickens' Christmas (2003). He offered "a $1000 reward to the first person who can find me the original medieval text of this so-called decree," valid until December 24, 2012. In the comments he wrote that the 19th-century references "are as far as I know, the earliest ones we know" and guessed the custom "probably started as a kind of schoolboy's joke." No decree has been cited since in any source we found.

The facts

• Collect text, Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity. Church of England, churchofengland.org
• Same collect in the 1549 Prayer Book (modern-spelling edition, W. S. Peterson, 1998). ccel.org
• Forby 1830 definition, "mince-pies." The Vocabulary of East Anglia, vol. 2, entry STIR-UP-SUNDAY, archive.org
• Brand/Ellis rhyme, 1849 Bohn edition. archive.org ; 1853 printing, p. 414, page image viewed: archive.org
• Harper's Weekly engraving, Dec 30, 1876. LoC, loc.gov
• Ivan Day's $1,000 challenge, Feb 7, 2012, and his comment. foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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