It’s Stir Up Sunday this weekend (November 23rd)!  The last Sunday before Advent, it’s traditionally the day on which the family gathers in the kitchen to make their Christmas pudding in order for it to mature before Christmas Day.  There’s still time to gather your ingredients if you want to get everyone cooking or you can honour the iconic seasonal dessert in a number of other ways too…

For Maggie, from Maggie and Rose’s The Family Members Clubs in London, “Christmas is all about family traditions, handed down from generation to generation” and Stir Up Sunday is one of her favourites.  “Cooking together is a dying tradition among modern families due to the convenience of readymade meals and foods, but if there is a time to get together and make an effort this is the day,” she writes.  “There are tricks to keep the whole family amused – cold beers in the fridge for the men, mulled wine for the ladies, a pot of piping hot soup and fresh bread for the guests, a good Christmas movie screening (highly recommend Arthur’s Christmas) and the promise of wishes coming true for the kids. Each member of the family invites a friend for a lovely Sunday afternoon jolly, of eating, drinking and mixing.”  If it’s not already a firm date in your family’s calendar then you can help introduce it by downloading “simply the best Christmas pudding recipe you will ever find” that Maggie shares on her post.  Delightfully illustrative, Maggie reminds you to “measure carefully and remember to soak the fruits the night before” and to “Encourage children to join in, they love using the scales and let everyone take a turn stirring and making a wish. The trick is to stir east to west, which symbolises the journey that the three wise men took – this is super lucky for wishes. This recipe has been designed with kids in mind, and has tick boxes for them to take part in the fun.”

For more printable pudding recipes try Delia Smith, Lesley Waters and, for a Christmas Pudding with tropical fruit and rum that’s prepared in just 20 minutes, Ocado.

If you’re worried that too many little cooks will spoil the pudding then their fingers could be kept busy with Activity Village’s Christmas Pudding Printables including a poster, jigsaw, learn to draw and puzzle or they can make a start on your seasonal mail with its printable figgy pudding Christmas card.

Another template for a Christmas pudding card, this one designed by Jenny Hodges, can be found on Papercraft Inspirations, Crafty Ferret’s FREE printable sewing buttons Christmas pudding card uses “an extra large brown [digital] button motif on to create the main part of the Christmas pudding and tiny red buttons for the Holly berries”.

If you’d like to include a letter in with your cards then Primary Treasure Chest’s Christmas Page Borders include a Christmas pudding design in three versions – plain, narrow lined and wide lined.

Looking for tags rather than cards?  Head to Party Delights to download its four Christmas pudding tags which also feature a reindeer, penguin, Father Christmas and snowman.  Or click on At Home With Ali for a “deliciously plump Christmas pudding” tag (as well as a partridge in a pear tree design).

Or, if you have some small gifts you’d like to present with a pudding on the top, try printing out and folding some of Gingham Cherry’s Pudding Origami Boxes or Cyberdrone’s Cubeecraft Christmas pudding.

And if papercrafts are your thing then don’t miss Ink Factory’s own Christmas pudding scrapbooking paper.

Laura from Bugs and Fishes offers a guide to making “yummy felt Christmas puddings” in her Felt Ornament How-To #3 post which comes with a printable pattern sheet, as does City Girl Gone Coastal’s How To Make Felt Christmas Pudding Decorations project.

And The Lady will also have you reaching for a needle rather than a spoon with its Stitch Your Own Pudding article that includes a template from Cath Kidston’s book Make Your Own Christmas Decorations.

Pick up two needles and you can have a go at Frankie Brown’s knitted Advent Garland Christmas Pudding.

If you are cooking your own this weekend, don’t forget to let everyone in the family have a go at stirring the pudding and making a wish while they do it!

Do you love finding printables on the internet?  Do you have particular favourites?  Or have you featured some on your own blog?  Email karen.malpass @ inkfactory.com with your links and we may be able to feature them in a future post.