Christmas Pudding — Reflection & Craft

Returning to Christmas Pudding — Well Steamed, I come back to the moment — and to the way it was shaped.

First, a reflection on anger, humour, and recalibration.
Then, a note on the craft behind the story.

It’s Christmas. There should be pudding and goodwill.
Instead, Medea is storming down Gertrude Street with a newspaper in her fist.

We’ve all seen that look. We’ve perhaps worn it.
The look that says: something has tipped. And how quickly that look is translated.

‘She’s in one of her moods’.
‘She’s overreacting’.
‘She’s a bit unhinged’.

Anger in women is rarely granted legitimacy. It is frequently reframed as instability.
Especially when it challenges someone with more institutional power.

What interests me about this story is not revenge.
It’s recalibration.

Medea does not collapse into humiliation.
She does not internalise the narrative that has been constructed around her.
Instead, she reaches sideways — to another woman.

They laugh. They plot.
They create something absurd.
And in doing so, they restore balance.

Margaret Atwood once observed that men are afraid women will laugh at them, while women are afraid men will kill them.

That imbalance hovers in the background of many interactions.
But sometimes, laughter itself becomes resistance.

Not shrill.
Not violent.
Just clever.

The pudding is ridiculous. It is theatrical. It is risky.
But it is also a refusal to accept the role of ‘madwoman’ quietly.

As the women in The Robber Bride understand — when the playing field is uneven, wit and solidarity can be powerful tools.

Not every situation calls for retaliation.
But every situation asks us to notice.

When is anger destructive?
When is it information?
When is it creative?

And what happens when we dare to hold the line — without losing our sense of humour?

Stories often begin with an imbalance.

In this case, a journalist uses his public platform to humiliate a woman. The injury is personal, but it is also public. He has the newspaper, the audience and the authority. Medea appears cornered.

What interested me was not the injury itself, but what happens next.

Rather than collapse into shame, Medea allows her anger to become fuel. Together with a friend, she creates distance from the original hurt. That distance allows choice. Choice allows creativity.

The Christmas pudding becomes the turning point.

It is a small domestic object, yet it carries enormous symbolic weight. Through it, the women transform a situation in which they seemed powerless, into one in which they control the narrative.

Humour plays an important role here. It exposes the disproportion between the original offence and the journalist’s outraged reaction. The more furious he becomes, the more ridiculous he appears.

At its heart, the story is about initiative. Medea and her friend refuse to behave in the expected way. They are witty, resourceful and deeply allied with one another.

By the end, the journalist’s lack of compassion and sense of humour have become visible to everyone. And when a court case arrives from an entirely different direction, Medea’s instincts are quietly vindicated.

Sometimes the most effective response to power is not confrontation.

Sometimes it is imagination.