Some families make Christmas pudding because it's traditional. Others make it because they're fairly sure that if they skipped a year, some long-dead great-aunt would claw her way out of the churchyard to break down the door and complain about it. The Wetherbys were firmly in the second camp.
For as long as anyone could remember, the family pudding had been made on the Sunday before Advent. The recipe lived in a battered notebook with a cracked leather cover, three pages missing, and a number of suspicious stains that had survived at least four generations. Nobody knew who had first written it down. The earliest name inside the cover was Edith Wetherby, 1891, but the recipe looked older than that. Over the years, ingredients had been crossed out and replaced, the suet adjusted, the quantities fiddled with, and at some point in the 1950s somebody had added a great deal more brandy. That particular amendment had never been challenged.
Three lines, though, nobody was allowed to touch.
Use dark stout.
Add the silver sixpence last.
Stir thirteen times clockwise, then once for whoever is missing.
Nobody knew what the last one meant. Every year someone asked, and every year someone else shrugged and said, "It's tradition." Tradition is a wonderfully useful word. It will explain almost anything, as long as nobody thinks about it too hard.
In 2008, the pudding was Margaret Wetherby's responsibility, known to everyone as Maggie. Maggie was sixty-seven, cheerful and formidable in roughly equal measure, and she could make four people feel guilty just by walking into a room holding a tea towel. She lived in the old family house just outside Ashcombe with her husband Harold. Their daughter Claire lived nearby with her husband David and their two children, Alfie and Sophie, which meant pudding day was a family occasion. Whether anybody enjoyed it was beside the point. Attendance was expected.
By ten that morning the kitchen was already chaos. Every surface had a bowl on it; there were raisins in places raisins had no business being, and Sophie was working her way through the glacé cherries, believing nobody had noticed. David had been sent out for stout and had come back with lager.
Maggie looked at the bottles. "What's that?"
"Beer."
"That is not stout."
"It's still beer."
Maggie just looked at him, and David put his coat back on straight.
Harold was at the kitchen table with the newspaper.
"You could help," Maggie said.
"I am helping."
"How?"
"By staying out of your way."
Maggie thought about this. "Fair enough."
Alfie, who was nine, had been given the important job of weighing the breadcrumbs. He had weighed some of them. He had also eaten some of them, and nobody was quite sure of the ratio.
Eventually everything went into the big ceramic bowl that had been used for Wetherby puddings since before Maggie was born, and the family gathered round.
"Right," said Maggie. "Everyone has a stir."
That was another tradition: everyone took a turn with the spoon and made a wish. Sophie went first, then Alfie, then Claire, then David, who had come back with the correct stout and still hadn't fully recovered from the experience. Harold went last.
Then Maggie took the spoon. "Now. Thirteen clockwise."
Alfie started counting, and everyone else joined in. The mixture was thick, and Maggie stirred slowly. "Eleven, twelve, thirteen." She stopped and rested the spoon against the side of the bowl. "And one for whoever is missing."
She always did that last stir herself. This year, Harold spoke up.
"Let Alfie do it."
Maggie looked at him. "Why?"
"He's old enough."
Alfie grinned. Maggie handed him the wooden spoon.
"One stir."
"I know."
"One."
"Yes, Grandma."
"Clockwise."
"I know."
Alfie stirred once. Then, because the mixture was thick and the spoon got stuck, he gave it another shove.
Maggie froze. So did Alfie. Everyone looked into the bowl.
"Was that two?" Claire asked.
"No, I know how to count", Alfie said instantly.
"It was definitely two," said Sophie.
"You weren't counting."
"I was watching."
Maggie took the spoon back. "Well."
Everyone waited.
"Well, what?" said David.
"I don't know."
Harold folded his newspaper. "It's pudding, Maggie."
"It's the recipe."
"It's still pudding."
Maggie peered into the mixture with deep suspicion. Nothing happened. Eventually she sighed and said, "Fine."
The mixture was split between two basins, covered with greaseproof paper and foil, tied up tight and set to steam in the big pans. For the rest of the day the house smelled of spice and fruit and brandy, and nothing supernatural happened at all, which was reassuring. By the evening Maggie had almost forgotten about the extra stir.
Almost.
The big pudding went into the pantry to mature until Christmas. The small one was earmarked for Boxing Day.
The next morning Maggie came down to find the pantry door open. She was sure she'd shut it. Inside, everything looked as it should: jars, tins, flour, two puddings. Except that the big pudding had moved. Maggie knew exactly where she'd put it, and it was now six inches to the left.
She looked at the pudding, then at the shelf, then at the pudding again.
"Harold?"
No answer.
"Harold!"
He appeared in the doorway. "What?"
"Did you move this?"
He looked at the pudding. "No."
"Are you sure?"
"I haven't moved a pudding since 1974, and you know how that ended"
Maggie decided this was believable, and put the pudding back. By the afternoon it was six inches to the right. The next day it was facing the other way. On Wednesday she found it on the shelf below, and puddings, as a rule, do not climb.
She didn't mention any of this. She was starting to suspect the extra stir, and she was also starting to suspect that saying so out loud would make her sound ridiculous.
Then the cherries began to go.
Maggie kept a jar of glacé cherries in the pantry. Thursday morning, she noticed the lid was off, and several were missing. She blamed Harold. Harold denied it, of course, but wouldn’t anyone trying to cover their tracks, she thought. The next morning five had disappeared, then seven, then eight.
Friday night she couldn't sleep, so just after midnight she went down to the kitchen and caught the culprit in the act.
The pantry door was open, and a small dark shape lay on the floor. Maggie switched on the light.
The Christmas pudding froze. So did Maggie.
For several seconds neither of them moved. The pudding had somehow got itself out of its basin. It was round, dark, and glossy, with pale streaks running across the top like poured sauce, and two enormous black eyes staring straight at her. A glacé cherry was sticking out of what looked very much like a mouth.
Maggie screamed. The pudding screamed back, or at least Maggie assumed the noise came from the pudding; it sounded like someone treading on a concertina.
Harold came thundering down the stairs with a walking stick. "What's happened?"
Maggie pointed. The pudding looked at Harold, and Harold looked at the pudding, and the cherry slowly disappeared into its mouth.
Harold lowered the stick. "Well."
"That's the pudding."
"Yes."
"It's got eyes."
"I'd noticed."
The pudding rolled backwards. Maggie stepped towards it, and it rolled faster.
"Don't you dare."
It shot under the kitchen table. Harold sat down heavily.
"I think we need a cup of tea."
"There is a living Christmas pudding in the kitchen."
"All the more reason."
They spent the next twenty minutes trying to catch it, and the pudding turned out to be surprisingly quick. It went under chairs, behind cupboards and, on one occasion, straight between Harold's legs. In the end, Maggie cornered it by the fridge.
"Got you."
The pudding stared up at her. Maggie stared back. It produced another glacé cherry from somewhere.
"Where are you getting those?"
The pudding swallowed it. Harold started laughing.
Maggie turned round. "This is not funny."
That only made him laugh harder.
The next morning Claire's phone rang.
"Your pudding's come alive," said her mother.
There was a pause. "Mum?"
"Yes?"
"Have you been at the brandy?"
"No."
Another pause. "Is Dad there?"
"Yes."
"Put him on."
Harold took the phone. "The pudding's come alive."
Claire was there in twenty minutes. David came too, assuming somebody would need medical attention, and the children came because nobody could have stopped them. They found the pudding sitting under a chair. Sophie fell in love with it immediately. Alfie looked horrified.
"Did I do that?"
Nobody answered him. Maggie tapped the recipe book. "Two for whoever's missing."
Alfie looked at the pudding. "Sorry," he said.
The pudding rolled towards him. Alfie backed away, but it stopped by his foot and leaned gently against his ankle, and Alfie broke into a smile.
"I think he likes me."
"He?" said Maggie.
"He looks like a he."
"How can a pudding look like a he?"
Alfie shrugged.
"What are we calling him?" Sophie asked.
"We are not naming the Christmas pudding," said Maggie.
Ten minutes later he was called Pudsey.
Pudsey developed a personality quite quickly, and most of it was trouble. He stole food, never very much: usually cherries, sometimes biscuits, and on one occasion an entire mince pie. Nobody could work out where he put any of it. He also turned out to have a worrying interest in alcohol, which came to light when David left a small glass of brandy on the table. Pudsey rolled up to it, appeared to sniff it, then tipped the glass towards himself, and half the brandy vanished. He rolled into a cupboard with a loud bang and came out a few minutes later travelling diagonally.
Maggie confiscated the bottle. "No more."
Pudsey stared at her.
"No."
Pudsey rolled over to Harold.
"Don't look at me," said Harold.
For all the chaos, though, something about Pudsey changed the feel of the house. People came round more. Claire started popping in on her way home from work. The children invented games that involved rolling Pudsey down the hall, and Maggie objected to these right up until the day Pudsey knocked a vase off a table and somehow caught it before it hit the floor. Nobody could explain that either.
He had one habit they didn't understand at first. Whenever someone was sad, Pudsey found them. He didn't necessarily do anything; he just turned up. When Sophie came home crying after falling out with her best friend, Pudsey rolled into her bedroom and sat by the bed. When David had bad news at work, Pudsey was under his chair that evening. When Maggie got upset over an old photograph she'd found in a drawer, Pudsey sat by her foot until she picked him up.
And then there was Harold.
It was Harold's first Christmas without his older brother Samuel, who had died in February. They'd been brothers for seventy-one years and friends for about sixty-eight of them, once you allowed for a few childhood disputes involving bicycles, marbles and one business with a frog that Harold flatly refused to discuss. Sam had spent nearly every Christmas with them. He sat in the same chair, told the same jokes, complained about the sprouts, and insisted on carving the turkey every year despite being objectively terrible at it.
Nobody said much about Sam that year. The family thought they were protecting Harold, and Harold thought he was protecting them.
On Christmas Eve everyone gathered at Maggie and Harold's. Presents were piled under the tree, food was all over the kitchen, music was on, and Pudsey was wearing a red ribbon Sophie had tied round him, which he put up with surprisingly well. Everyone was cheerful except Harold. He tried. He laughed, poured drinks and told stories, but his eyes kept going back to the empty armchair by the fire. That was Sam's chair, and nobody had moved it.
At half past nine, Harold slipped quietly out of the room. Pudsey noticed and rolled after him.
Harold went into the kitchen and stood at the window, looking out at the dark garden. Pudsey bumped gently against his slipper.
Harold looked down. "Hello, you."
He picked Pudsey up, and for a while neither of them moved.
"This is daft," Harold said eventually. Pudsey said nothing. "It's Christmas." Still nothing. "I miss him."
Pudsey shifted a little in his hands. Harold swallowed.
"I keep thinking he's going to walk in and complain we've started without him."
Pudsey wriggled so hard that Harold nearly dropped him. "What?"
Pudsey twisted round towards the pantry, so Harold followed him in. The old recipe book was sitting on the shelf, and Pudsey rolled towards it. Harold opened it, and for the first time in his life he properly looked at the strange line.
Stir thirteen times clockwise, then once for whoever is missing.
He stared at it for a long moment, and then he called for Maggie.
"What?" she said, coming in.
He pointed. "Whoever is missing."
Maggie frowned. "I know what it says."
"No. Think about it."
They stood in the pantry, saying nothing, and then Maggie understood.
"It was never part of the recipe," she said.
Harold shook his head. "It was remembering."
The last stir had never been superstition. It was a moment, one turn of the spoon for somebody who ought to have been there: a parent, a husband, a child, a friend, someone missing from the table who was still part of the family. Generations of Wetherbys had kept on doing it long after they'd forgotten why. And this year Alfie had stirred twice, once for Sam and once more.
Maggie looked down at Pudsey. "You," she said.
Pudsey blinked, or seemed to.
He hadn't been made by Alfie's mistake, not really. The extra stir had just given the tradition somewhere to go. Pudsey was the empty place at the table, made visible, and he belonged to whoever needed him.
This year Sam's photograph sat by the tree; they sat by the fire and told stories about him. Harold even finally told the story about the frog, that Sam would never tell anyone. It wasn’t worth the years of secrecy, but everyone laughed anyway; they imagined Sam would be laughing about it too, knowing they had spent so long prying it out of him for it to be a rubbish story. Sam's chair was left empty at the table, purposefully this time, not because nobody could face moving it.
When the pudding came out, Pudsey sat on the table in his ribbon, watching with his huge black eyes. Nobody suggested eating him. Maggie had made another one, a normal one, more or less.
Halfway through pudding, Harold caught Pudsey staring at the brandy sauce. "No."
Pudsey turned to Maggie. "No."
Pudsey looked at Alfie, and Alfie quietly dipped a spoon in the sauce.
"Alfie."
"Sorry."
Pudsey had it anyway, and spent the next hour rolling in slow circles round the Christmas tree. It turned out to be one of the best Christmases the Wetherbys ever had.
Pudsey stayed with them for years. He never aged, never went off and never grew so much as a speck of mould, which Professor Barnabas Ravenwood would later describe as "perhaps the most compelling evidence yet discovered that Christmas pudding is fundamentally unnatural."
Ravenwood first came across Pudsey after Maggie wrote to him. Her letter, in full, read:
Dear Professor,
We have a pudding. It moves. Please advise.
Ravenwood arrived the following Tuesday, and Pudsey took against him immediately. When Ravenwood tried to measure him, Pudsey rolled away. When he tried to take a photograph, Pudsey turned his back. When Ravenwood got out his spectral resonance device, Pudsey stole a biscuit from his coat pocket. After three hours, the professor had learned almost nothing.
One thing he did notice, though, was that Pudsey reacted strongly whenever people talked about someone they missed. Whenever grief came into the room, Pudsey moved closer to it.
Ravenwood's eventual conclusion was that Pudsey wasn't exactly a ghost, and he wasn't exactly an enchanted pudding either, but something awkwardly in between, part memory, part tradition and part manifestation. He classified him as a Seasonal Emotional Ectoplasmic Construct. Maggie called him Pudsey, and her name caught on considerably better.
When Harold died, many years later, Pudsey vanished. The family searched everywhere: the pantry, the attic, every cupboard and under every bed, and found nothing.
The next year, on the Sunday before Advent, Claire made the family pudding herself for the first time. The old recipe book lay open beside her, and everyone gathered round, counting thirteen clockwise together. Then Claire stopped, and the kitchen went quiet.
"One for Dad," she said, and stirred.
Alfie, a grown man now, took the spoon from her. "And one for Grandma Maggie." He stirred again.
Something rolled under the table. Everyone went very still, and a familiar dark shape came out into the light, still wearing the same red ribbon and looking exactly as he always had.
Claire burst into tears. Pudsey rolled over to her, and she scooped him up.
"Where have you been?"
Pudsey just looked at her. Some questions don't need answering.
Pudsey still turns up at Christmas, though not always at the Wetherbys', which is the odd part. There are stories of him appearing in houses where someone is facing their first Christmas alone. Sometimes he's found under the tree, sometimes next to a photograph, and now and then someone comes downstairs to find a small dark ghost sitting beside an empty chair. He never stays long. Just long enough, usually.
Ravenwood's view is that the old Wetherby recipe didn't create Pudsey at all. It just showed him the way in. Every family ends up with an empty place sooner or later, and every Christmas table has names that get said a little less each year. Pudsey seems to find those places. He doesn't take the grief away, and he doesn't bring anyone back. He just reminds people that missing someone means there's still a place for them, and that sometimes the place needs a Christmas pudding with enormous black eyes, a dubious relationship with brandy and no respect whatsoever for the biscuit tin.
So if you're making a Christmas pudding this year, Ravenwood recommends sticking to the recipe. Stir thirteen times, then once for whoever is missing.
And if the spoon happens to go round one extra time, there's no need to panic.
Just hide the brandy.