I have been waiting for this moment - school reports behind me and able to cook the Christmas Pudd

Cooking the Christmas pudding represents so much to me. It means that as far as work goes, I am on the down hill run. Usually I write out my Christmas cards whilst the pudding is on the simmer, smelling the aroma of Christmas wafting through out the house, just as my mother did when I was little.

For Paul, it is a time of wanting to flee or go underground because it is a tense and tumultuous event, as I try to get a 'perfect skin' on my pudding. This year Paul absentmindedly asked mid-cooking, if I would mind moving my car out of the drive. The character 'forgot himself' but soon apologised as he witnessed me blow up, and flap around the kitchen like a Terradactyl.

Every year I make my Aunty Bev's Christmas pudding. The recipe my Mum has always used. My Aunty Bev died of Cancer when she was my age - in her 30s, with a young daughter. I was a kid at the time of her death but I was VERY close to her as was my sister and parents, of course. I often think what it would have been like to die a slow and painful death at such a young age, having to farewell a beautiful, daughter (her only child). Bev loved her daughter, my cousin Lisa, so completely. Lisa, Trudy and I are like sisters and always will be.

I have documented 'the Christmas pudding experience' and asked Paul and Lil to take photos, so that I can teach Lily this recipe - so that this tradition may live on in our family.

Merry Christmas from Paul, Tracey, Lily, Lucy and Frody xo