Backstory: Figgy Pudding
Christmas Past
Brian Earl
4.9 • 791 Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2021
⏱️ 12 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, |
| 0:06.0 | and a Happy New Year. The origins of this song are lost to history. We just know that it's old, |
| 0:12.5 | and it's English, and that there have been several versions of it, including one where the singers |
| 0:17.1 | wish you a pocketful of money and a cellar full of beer. But the one that you're |
| 0:21.4 | most familiar with is the one you're hearing now. Written at a time when figgy pudding was so |
| 0:26.4 | common and popular and presumably so delicious, so festive and emblematic of the Christmas |
| 0:31.7 | season, that groups of carolers visiting door-to-door felt right at home singing its praises, |
| 0:36.8 | literally, and demanding that it be |
| 0:38.6 | served. Seriously, three whole verses in this version of the song are about figgy pudding. First, |
| 0:44.4 | it's, we wish you a Merry Christmas, then good tidings, etc., and then write into three full verses |
| 0:49.2 | about Figgy pudding. If you celebrate Christmas in America, you might find yourself wondering, |
| 0:55.2 | what is Figgy pudding? And what is Figgie pudding? |
| 0:56.2 | And what's so great about it? |
| 0:57.5 | And how is it different from plum pudding or Christmas pudding? |
| 1:01.3 | And where is it? |
| 1:02.7 | Why do we only mostly hear about it in the song or Dickens is a Christmas Carol and only rarely |
| 1:07.5 | see it or taste it at Christmas time? |
| 1:10.4 | The Figgie pudding is alive and well. It just never taste it at Christmas time. The figgy pudding is alive and well. |
| 1:12.2 | It just never made it big in America, which is actually a little surprising. |
| 1:16.3 | A dense and delicious, festive and fattening, not to mention boozy, treat that's commonly set on fire before serving it, seems like a natural fit. |
| 1:24.5 | The figgy pudding is neither figgy nor what we Americans would consider pudding-y. |
| 1:29.0 | And for centuries, it wasn't even considered especially Christmassy. The story of how we got |
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