Sunday, November 25, 2007

Nov 25 Uk - Stir up Sunday



Stir up Sunday is a sort of joke. The prayer for the day begins "Stir up, oh Lord, the hearts of your people..." and the joke is that this is the day when you start making your Christmas puddings and "stir them up". The one person I mentioned it to today assured me that it was much too late and that his grandmother started making her puddings in August. Regardless you can still make them if you like so you can click here for a link to a recipe. I wrote a play that used "stir-up Sunday". It's very ingenious and all happens in the space of time it takes to bake a cake in the microwave (about 10 minutes), then the audience, or the actors can eat the cake at the end. Here's a link to the play - actually it makes an excellent two hander for a Christmas show so I hope you use it. Click here for the link.

Enough self promotion. Oh no, I've had second thoughts on that. We were talking to our friend Georgina the other night. She writes very nice poems and I asked her if she had one for the Blog. She said she hadn't written anything that fitted the theme. So I encouraged her to do so. Maybe she will. Meanwhile I wondered if I could do so myself. At the time, I could only think of two rhymes for "leaves" - "grieves" and "thieves". Gerard Manley Hopkins has used the first (quoted in an earlier post - click here for the poem) so I wondered what could be done with "thieves". Here is my contribution.

Autumn leaves, autumn leaves
Are of little interest to thieves.

In fact there's so many of them around

You can almost pick them off the ground.


You are invited to try your hand and see if you can do worse. Anyway here is today's tree photo and a series of photos of leaves taken in the last week.
November 19 - pretty green but especially in the leaf veins.

November 21 - about the same just a bit browner

November 23 - the green can just be seen in the veins.

and today - November 25 - almost everything brown now, in a day or two the twig will be bare.

Back to stir up Sunday. It is beauty like I have seen this amazing autumn, that stirs up my heart. I hope I have managed to pass on some of the joy of it to you. Here's today's sunset to end with.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear NIck,

I've been enjoying your blog - but I missed Stir Up Sunday, and only made my mince-meat tonight (Tuesday) - mince-meat not pudding, which I don't really like. But we all had a wish as the boys stirred the mixture in the big mixing bowl. Maybe a Mellersh tradition, or does it go back earlier?
love Mary (your niece).