Then it was Suet Pudding. Now, it’s love

I really thought it was ridiculous.

I was a lofty high school student with dreams of solving all the problems of the world.  I had a future ahead of me and one that included empowerment of women and leadership.  I was not going to be confined by someone else’s definition of me and was definitely not going to do something because it met someone else’s expectations.  I was enlightened, ready for the world and sure of the right answers.  I was also 17.

It was the first week of Advent and my mother reminded me that we had made a pact about Suet pudding.  It’s true.  I had.  I could feel the resentment surging like volcanic ash, but I knew better than to let it overflow.  I thought that I could speed up this unnecessary and archaic tradition leftover from the farm days of our past — if I found the pan in the basement and the old rags that could never be replaced and not think about what suet really was.  Oh, then there was the recipe card that was in my grandmother’s handwriting.

Cancer had taken her mother a year before my birth and I always knew that I was the restoration of life for my mother…but despite the emotion, the recipe card was still hard to read.  I knew that sometimes the look in my eye and a sideways glance brought a twinkle and a tear to her eye as she said it was her Mother’s and she was deeply touched while I thought it was bizarre.  Funny, how I have that same experience when I spend just a few minutes with my great-niece Madison and know that my mother’s spirit lives and breaths in her.  Interesting how bizarre becomes blessing…

A few minutes into my refusal to touch the suet because I wasn’t about to engage with such a vile substance, I really forgot about my objections — softened by the ambiance of Advent…and my mother’s ferocious spirit of love encased in empowerment.  She whistled Christmas tunes — I only later discovered that she started whistling after the death of her parents — she had no siblings and lost them just a year apart.  Touching things, she would tell me — made them feel like they were in the room. So much of her lives in me as I know that feeling of touching my way into remembrance.

It was first week of Advent stuff…the suet and sugar and butter and thousands of other ingredients measured by pinch and taste until the old pan from the days of the South Dakota farm was ready to be loaded, wrapped, covered and surrounded with the same cloths that had been used for generations to wait upon the Advent of life.  

For three weeks the wrapping would surround the suet and when the pink candle was lit, it would be time to bring the old pan in from the cold outside and remove the mummy-wrap for a week in the fridge before it would find it’s final resting spot in the steamer on Christmas Eve.

I was 17 and it all seemed a little crazy.  Suet wrapped in old rags and a pan that needed to be replaced, with a lid that barely fit right.  We could buy her a new pan — I told her with some newly resurrected cynicism, but she just laughed and whistled “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and hugged me and told me that someday I would understand that Advent is about letting yourself be wrapped in swaddling clothes as you wait for the manger.  She was right.  It was 1976 and I had places to go, a world to save and not much time for things that seemed inefficient.

I have been thinking about those swaddling wrappings of the suet pudding pan — and the way that the cold enfolded it to transform it from suet to something you just can’t replace.  I’ve been thinking about standing in that kitchen while she whistled her favorite “Up on the Rooftop” and knowing that it was all seasoned with a few tears of remembrance and a promise of hope.

Now, it’s 2017 and I know that Advent takes time — and good things — like love, kindness, generosity, and suet pudding…need time to ferment and be changed from one thing into another.  Now, I would give lots of “stuff” for a piece of that good old fashioned, archaic, meaningless and not efficient suet pudding.

That’s the thing about Advent — it just gets better the longer you let the swaddling do it’s work and increase the heart of the matter while everything changes!