December 22nd

Back at the start of November, I made my first Christmas cake. No small thanks to my dad who made a round trip through rural Wales in the dark to get lemons from the local garage, after a lemon-table incident with the previous lemons. The top hat of baking paper barely fitted in the oven, and the quantities were questionable due to the varying sizes of cups and conversions. But it worked! And after various travels with me around the country, definitely-too-much Cointreau pooling on top when I remembered to feed it, and last minute marzipan and icing in a friend’s kitchen, the hope that November-me had made it with, came good.

I didn’t make the icing or marzipan, just for full disclosure. Next year. But, here it is. The cake happened. Bearing hope to me, in the making it in other’s kitchen’s, though I don’t have my own, and bearing hope - I hope - to others in it tasting - I think - as good as it looks.

I made it hoping to give it away. To share it with people I love. I gave some to friends who give me a home in their house and their church whenever I’m near, and who give that most precious welcome of being themselves around me and also of loving Robin. I gave some to beloved friends including one who is four, that I had a pre-Christmas lunch with yesterday, my heart full of all the Christmases of friendship we had shared. And after Robin got me the role of a shepherd in their church’s nativity, a reprise of my first ever acting experience when I was also four.

I have some safe a tin for some new friends who circumstance meant I didn’t get to see yesterday - so it will bear hope in my car for a while until I do - and I sliced some for friends who have incredibly gracefully made their home mine, and their dad who has been a good friend to me since I was a two year old climber and balanced my way along his communion rail. (I don’t think that happened at Christmas but for a good story we can pretend that it did.)

I gave some to someone I don’t know that well but who sometimes gives me cake, and she also gave me some of hers. I’m eating her one (delicious) now as I type this, Robin bunched on my feet so fast asleep that she hasn’t even noticed there’s food. We are both Very Tired after my long pilgrimages to Leeds this term, and her long waits for me to get back. But in the midst of it, despite/with/through it, the cake happened.

And along with a lot of alcohol, it bears hope. Of old and new friends. Of something in common with kind strangers. Of a God who makes fruit and nuts and grains and the physics of Things Becoming Cake. And there is incarnation here, in the sweetness and the welcome into friends’ kitchens and round their tables and the ache of stirring and the relief of rising and the pilgrimage with lemons.

[Image description: a slightly blurry picture of a chunk of Christmas cake, all the picture consists of is icing really, shining, haphazard, white icing, glowing slightly because the light when I took the photo was weird. It’s sitting on a dark blue plate belonging to friends, because this chunk of cake now belongs to them.]