Tag: Bullet pudding

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Childermas & Christmas Games December 28th

Pick-up-sticks or Spillikins

On the fourth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Four calling birds, Three French hens, Two turtle-doves
And a partridge in a pear tree.

Holy Innocents Day or Childermas is dedicated to children on the day Herod ordered the slaughter of children aged two or under, in an attempt to kill the prophesied Messiah. However, the massacre is only mentioned by Matthew, and other classical sources, despite being anti-Herod, don’t mention it. It is thought to be ‘modelled’ on the massacre of young children mentioned in Exodus when the Pharoah hears about the birth of Moses.

It is, therefore, as far as folklore is concerned, an ill-omened day so don’t begin any new enterprise or, indeed, attempt to go back to work. And remember, as Childermas falls on a Sunday this year, Sundays throughout the year are all ill-omened days. There was a medieval tradition that people should avoid work on the day of the week that Childermas fell until the next childermas. Bad luck this year as it’s a Sunday!

Weather wise, according to a 17th formulae, as the fourth day of Christmas is warm, expect the fourth month, April to be similarly warm.

Christmas Games

So, no sloping off to the Study, it’s best to spend the time playing Christmas Games. The one I remember, most fondly, is pick-up-sticks or spillikins. You drop a pile of sticks onto a table-top or the floor. Then have to pick up as many sticks as you can without disturbing any others. Your turn ends when you move a stick. Different sticks have different values. We also played Dominoes, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders.

But, to get the whole room joining in, we played two card games. Participants could sit in their comfy armchairs rather than at a table.  Chase the Ace.  Newmarket. 

Chase the Ace is, apparently, also, rather unpleasantly, called Screw Your Neighbour in the US! Each person is dealt a card. In turn, they choose to swap it with their neighbour.  At the end of the round, the lowest cardholder (ace is low) loses a life.  A player is excluded after losing 3 lives. Last one standing is the winner.

Newmarket (or Michigan) is a gambling game in which everyone places a stake on 4 picture cards. Theare are placed in the centre of the room.  If your cards comes out in the play, you win the money staked on the card.  The point of both these games is that any number of people can play, and they are simple and fast.

Another game we played at parties was Bullet Pudding. Players cut off bits of a flour pudding until the coin or bullet falls into the basin.  The unlucky player (me last time I played) has to pick it up with his teeth.

Bullet Pudding Christmas game as played in the Flude family 24th December 2024

Here is a photo of the one we played on 24th December,2024. My 97-year-old dad is in the background. You can see what a messy game it can be!

I have moved the 18th Century Jane Austen Christmas Games content from here to the page shown below.

Christmas with Jane Austen December 20th

Santa Klaus for the Elite

Apparently, the development of the American Santa Klaus was a way for the elite to keep control of the rowdy working class in New York. The argument, in a nutshell, is that the folk Christmas was outside and rowdy. Then Clement Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. This introduced a domesticated indoor middle-class version of Father Christmas. It’s a fascinating spin on the traditional story.

https://skippedhistory.substack.com/p/professor-stephen-nissenbaum-on-santa-a48?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=53190&post_id=90879443&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

First written on December 28th 2022, revised and republished in December 2023, 2024, 2025

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Christmas with Jane Austen December 20th

Christmas with Jane Austen and Bullet Pudding

Christmas at Godmersham Park

Fanny Austen Knight was the daughter of Jane Austen’s rich older brother Edward. He, rather strangely to our modern minds, was adopted by distant relatives who were childless. ‘Hey! We have enough boys to be going on with – happy for you to take one, particularly as you own two stately homes!’ as Mr and Mrs George Austen probably never said.

One of those homes was Godmersham Park in Kent, the other was in Chawton, a lovely Hampshire Village where Jane, Cassandra and Mum Cassandra lived, and is now a Museum dedicated to Jane Austen.

Fanny also rather cruelly remembers Jane and Cassandra as being unfashionably dressed and not up with upper-class etiquette. She wrote this when she was an old woman. When she was a teenager and being well brought up, she wrote letters to friends of the family and relatives. Here are extracts from her Christmas letters.

Christmas Games

1811 to 1812 Fanny writing to a friend, Miss Dorothy Chapman

‘I don’t know whether I told you that Misss Morris’s are at home for the Christmas holidays. They are very nice girls and have contributed a good deal to our entertainment. None of us caught the whooping cough and have been very well the whole time. We have, in general, had cards, snapdragons, bullet pudding etc on any particular evening and Whist, Commerce and others and tickets were the favourite games. I think when cards fail the boys played every evening at draughts, chess, and backgammon.‘

Commerce is a three card poker type game played with counters. Tickets was Lydia Bennett’s favourite game, which is a gambling game based on luck. It is called, in Pride and Prejudice, ‘Lottery Tickets.’ One imagines it is not a compliment to Lydia’s intelligence that she prefers a game of pure chance.

Bullet Pudding

Bullet Pudding is explained by Fanny in another letter

‘You must have a large pewter dish filled with flour which you must pile up into a sort of pudding with a peak at the top, you must then lay a Bullet at the top & everybody cuts a slice of it & the person who is cutting it when the Bullet falls must poke about with their noise & chins until they find it & then take it out with their mouths which makes them strange figures all covered with flour, but the worst is that you must not laugh for fear of the flour getting up your nose & mouth & choking you. You must not use your hands in taking the bullet out.’

I used to play this as a child at Christmas. We used a coin, not a bullet. The contestants walk around the table with the flour pudding on which has a knife ready for cutting the pudding. When the music stops, the one the knife is pointing at cuts off a slice of the flour pudding. They hope not to make the flour collapse and the coin fall. In my family, we pushed the winner’s head into the flour to maximise the fun. Snapdragons is a lively game, you put some brandy in a tray or flat dish, add a few raisins, light the brandy and the game is to pick up and eat the raisins without getting burnt!

Other games mentioned by Fanny

Hunt the Slipper, Oranges and Lemons, Wind the Jack; Lighting a Candle in Haste; Spare Old Noll.

Another niece Anna received Jane Austen’s advice on writing a novel:

‘You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on, and I hope you will do a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.’

Follow this link to see my post on Mary Musgrove’s Christmas Letter to Anne Elliot in Persuasion.

First Published 20th December 2022, revised and republished December 2023, 2024, 2025

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