A Scottish family Christmas, Cummings style

The biggest challenge is the flour. It is difficult to bake traditional Canadian Christmas recipes in Edinburgh because British flour is so different from Canadian flour. Canadian flour is much higher in protein,  and the laws of chemistry seem to dictate that any Canadian recipe prepared with British flour will fail horribly. The same can be said of Polish recipes, and when a Polish friend taught me how to make pierogies last week, we sent another Polish friend on his bicycle to the Polish grocery store to buy us Polish flour.

Sadly there is no Canadian grocery store in Edinburgh, and so when it comes to Canadian baking, the only thing I can do is wait for a representative of my family to show up, stunned and jetlagged, with a big bag of economy all-purpose flour in her luggage. This year that was my eldest sister; last year it was my mother. My husband Mark and I had convinced my parents and my youngest brother and sister to spend their Christmas in sunny Scotland. Being in a hospitable mood, Scotland decided to have an epic blizzard before they arrived, and thus my family was treated to a familiar landscape. My sister, who had come from her job in Spain, was ebullient.

“It’s just like being in Canada,” she cried.

But it wasn’t really, of course, as our life in Canada never involved living in a converted attic flat at the top of a 325-year-old country mansion/museum. The ceilings are low and sloping, and the shorter members of the family constantly reminded the taller to mind their heads. Life in Canada involves frozen pipes, but never a frozen pipe so long and inaccessible that we had to abandon all use of the kitchen sink. I spent Christmas Eve washing basin after basin of dishes until the six of us piled into a cab to go to midnight Mass. 

This, too, was a novelty for my family who, like most Roman Catholics, stick to the Ordinary Form whereas Mark and I famously prefer the Extraordinary Form. Last year my family had to come with us and lump the Latin in the bitter cold of our candle-lit, wooden church. But they very much liked the Gregorian Chant, and everyone joyfully sang “Hark the Herald Angels.” Then my father paid a taxi driver £36 to drive us back home, which must be such an outrageous sum in Canadian dollars, I can’t bear to do the calculations.

There was a tree, of course, which we bought from a nursery on the other side of the woods. And there were tremendous sessions of baking. I think Mark, who grew up in a country which has only in recent decades embraced the suspiciously Catholic holiday, was in awe of the terrible fuss and clouds of Canadian flour in the kitchen. The perennial family Christmas treats poured forth: the Florentines, the cinnamon cereal chewies, the Mexican mocha balls, the gingerbread men, the traditional shortbread, the striped shortbread and the cake for the Alaskan trifle. 

During my first Christmas in Scotland, as readers may remember, I had hysterics on the kitchen floor when I failed to produce the crucial Christmas morning Chelsea bun. Last Christmas my mother herself made the Chelsea bun, mixing up the dough last thing before she went to bed on Christmas Eve and baking it to perfection as soon as she woke up on Christmas morning. This impressed upon me like nothing else the importance of having your mother on hand at Christmas.

The assembled Cummings and McLeans spent Christmas morning sitting in their pyjamas opening Christmas presents and eating everything in sight. Mark saw what he had only heard about and scarcely believed: that the Cummings watch avidly as one person opens a present, admire the present and watch avidly as the next person opens a present. This ritual can take up to an hour or two. Then, in place of the usual languid afternoon, there was more activity as water was boiled, dishes washed in basins and Christmas dinner got ready.

And, of course, there was the newest and sweetest Christmas ritual: Skyping. My other sister and her son were in Ecuador, and my other brother with his family in Quebec. But thanks to the miracle of modern technology, we could see and hear the first family in a sunny Internet café and the second in their sitting-room, while both families could see and hear us in the attic flat.

Thus, as much as I love and argue for tradition, I will now pay my respects to innovation. Anything that brings families together at Christmastime, no matter how far apart they may be, has got to be one of the great gifts of God, perhaps on par with Canadian flour. So God bless the Internet and may your baking turn out this Christmas.