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A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters

The Four Quarters

The Four Quarters

The division of the tales of Christmas in England, Jamaica, India and New Zealand into four distinctly separate stories linked together by a central narrative allowed Lady Barker to include a number of different styles of stories together into one book; satisfying the different desires of the tastes of her sons Jack and George in their requests to her for stories as well as allowing her to revisit and describe the cultural traditions and her memories of several of the English colonies that she lived in during her life abroad.

The Christmas cake after which she names her book of stories would have been an ubiquitous part of the Christmas holidays for her readers of the time, young and old alike – Christmas cakes in one form or another have been an English tradition since the 16th century.57 Modern readers from countries with an English heritage will no doubt recognize or have their own holiday memories associated with the dessert and understand Lady Barker’s use of it as a cultural link between the Christmases in four otherwise very different settings with rather different traditions. Lady Barker touches on the significance of the title as a traditional part of an English Christmas in the section of the book “Christmas Day in Jamaica”; though it is referred to there as “the plum-pudding” (125) this is the same as a Christmas cake, the desert in question having developed through the years from what was originally a porridge of sorts.58 She refers to its importance as a “national dish” of England (125) and that the tradition of having one at Christmas is such that her father “considered it a dreadful, almost a wicked thing, to sit down to dinner on Christmas Day without roast beef, turkey, mince-pies, and a plum-pudding” (126). Therefore by calling her collection of tales A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters she is invoking an idea of a traditional English Christmas that would be familiar to all her readers, as well as making a reference to her own varied or “quartered” experiences with the changes necessary to traditions when spending Christmas in a different part of the world.