My mum loved to make a Christmas pudding, cooking it weeks before Christmas and letting it hang so that the flavours could develop properly. She had diligently saved a purse-full of sixpences at the beginning of decimal currency, so that she could hide them in the pudding, and would swap them out on Christmas day.
Once or twice there were…issues though. There was the year that Mum had hung the pudding in Dad's shed, and the dog found it and ate the lot. You wouldn't think a corgi could fit a whole Christmas pudding in there. When Mum put those sixpences into the pudding, she would count so that she knew how many there should be. She got back every single sixpence that the dog ate and boiled them for a very long time on the stove. She swears she never used those ones again, but…how would we know?
Then, having learnt her lesson with hanging the pudding where the dog could get to it, the next year she hung it up high, in the laundry. Laundries are damp places, it went mouldy.
The year Mum hung the pudding in the kitchen, all seemed to be going well. It was far too high for the dog to reach, and the kitchen was open-plan, nice and airy. But something seemed odd about the pudding. It looked a little flat on one side, and kind of sunken at the top. Mum poked a finger against the cloth and it sunk beneath her touch. She lifted it down and it seemed lighter than it should be. She opened the cloth and an enormous, fat mouse took one look at her from the middle of the hollowed-out pudding and ran for its life.
Despite the setbacks, there was always a delicious, home-cooked pudding on our Christmas table and everyone found room for a slice, despite having eaten far too much. Nana was small as a bird, but after eating up her slice of pudding, complained that she hadn't found sixpence and would have to have another slice. I watched as Mum cut the next slice and we both exchanged a glance as we saw the shiny side of a sixpence going into the piece for Nana's plate. Five minutes later another complaint from Nana: "No sixpence!" Mum never did get that one back.