I had the good fortune to grow up in a family that kept Christmas very well, and this year, I will be sharing some of my memories with this Advent Calendar. Please come by every day for a new image from the 20th century that has… something to do with Christmas.
We’re starting with A Pictorial Recipe for Your Plum Pudding, Specially Painted by a Well-Known Artist, from The Illustrated London News, Christmas Number 1961.
One of the harbingers of Advent every year was my mother getting out the “Christmas magazines” that her Auntie Molly sent her every year from London. The stack I still have includes the Illustrated London News, Holly Leaves (the Christmas issue of Farm & Country), Tatler, and Sphere, and they go from about 1960 to about 1967. These magazines were filled with delights, many of which I will be sharing here, although the articles are kind of random: Holly Leaves devoted a four-page photo spread to someone’s pet otters, for instance, and other topics included the history of fans, interesting chimneys, and the success of the grebe. These were interspersed with art, both Old Masters and specially commissioned artworks, such as the above. Neither the articles nor the artwork hewed strictly to the Christmas theme. The magazines opened and closed with ads for fine scotch, cigars, sedans, and charities such as the Home for Distressed Gentlefolk.
The caption writer who bemoaned the loss of the silver threepenny-bit probably would have liked even less the advent of the decimal system and the Euro, which take all the challenge out of calculating prices, but here’s something that hasn’t changed: “some merely regard the whole pudding as a convenient excuse for eating mounds of brandy or rum butter.”
Absolutely agree that the only purpose of *any* steamed pudding is the hard sauce.
This is a delightful idea. I look forward to seeing and reading your entire calendar.