Three Burned Cakes: Christmas Without Mum

This begins with my mother and I baking the Christmas cake together over our shared birthday weekend in October, evolves into a scramble over Mum’s bed for the most holey, misshapen, shrivelled, old-hockey-sock-stocking on Christmas Eve, and culminates in the Rawlinson choir of doom ploughing proudly through the carols in our old school’s chapel on Christmas Day. The rules are rigid (one present in the morning, but the rest after supper) and dissenters are quickly made to conform (as