About 2 minutes to read aloud.

The pudding will not set. That is the whole problem, and it is a good one: everything in the kitchen has been tried, the pot has been stirred and re-stirred, and still it sits there, stubborn and un-Christmassy, refusing to do the one thing a Christmas pudding is meant to do. The story follows what happens next, as help is called in.

Who gets summoned

Each helper who arrives is a little less likely than the one before, and each is certain their method will work, which is where the comedy sits. Nobody in the story is punished for getting it wrong and nobody learns a stated lesson about pudding-making. The problem is solved, or it is not, in the way a good comic story solves things: by following the trouble to its proper end rather than stopping at a tidy moral.

Reading it aloud

It is short enough for a single sitting before bed and built for a voice that can enjoy the escalation as it happens. For more on pacing a story like this one for a young listener, the grown-ups' page on reading aloud well has some practical notes. Other stories of a similar length are gathered on the stories page.