Stir up Sunday

Now is a good time to start preparations for the Christmas feast, while the rain slatters down on the windows and the spirits sink.  Now, and not at the end of August, which is still summer in my book, but was when the first items appeared in the shops here.

I made my cake some weeks ago and have opened it up to feed it dark rum.  Rum always featured heavily in West Cumbrian Christmases... rum custard, rum butter ... and rum to feed the cake. Long traditions going back to when Whitehaven was a major port. 

This, another of my sampler collection.  I found this square of white lawn with its haunting inscription in  a box at  a local boot fair here in Essex.  I paid all of thirty pence for it.  What can be made of the fact that the fine lettering of the verse is followed by a coarser hand for the name and date?  Was it finished by someone else to memorialise the death of the original stitcher?  Or was it undated and the date is there just to suggest age it doesn't have?  The tiny stitches of the verse certainly look authentically old.  I just love these fragmentary pieces with their unknown histories.