We drink to thee

It being 3 December, and the first week after Thanksgiving, I reckon that folks are pulling up their big-boy pants and cranking up the Christmas machine. Lists, stores, traffic…

You need a break.

And probably some alcohol.

So today we’ll have one of the approximately 12,347 variants of seasonal songs about mobs forming to rove villages in search of booze. This version is from Gloucestershire, because it’s called the “Gloucester/Gloucestershire Wassail Song”. I mean, I’m taking that as a clue.

Wassail, in case you are a little unclear, is one of the approximately 12,347 variants on mulled cider or wine or beer or mead. Mulling involves heating [mead, wine, beer or cider]; adding spices such as ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and the like; and topping it with a slice of toasted bread, as a sop. (Sop: you know—like the toasted slices of baguette or croutons on the top of soup. Think: French onion soup.)

Oh, and it’s drunk from one big, communal bowl. No germ theory here.

Wassail dates back to Medieval times. I don’t know when all the spices started to be added, because they would have been extraordinarily rare and prohibitively expensive during that period. And I’m not sure about the significance of the toast being white; white flour and bread were also very expensive, and therefore only the very wealthy could afford it.

I’ve never had wassail, to my knowledge; at least, never anything that announced itself as such. But every year around this time, I like to have a mug or two of Glühwein, which is pre-spiced red wine that’s served at Weihnachtsmärkte throughout Europe.

There is nothing like being out on a freezing December night, with a mug of Glühwein in your hand, wandering up and down aisles of stalls with Christmas gear of all types, and watching children go gaga.

The custom of wassailing—roving around the village singing and demanding booze—is bifurcated. In apple and cider country in the west of England, you go out to the orchards in mid-winter to, you know, wake them up. To serve notice that the trees will have to shake off their winter sleep in a couple of months, and get back to work, because those apples are key to the local economy.

Wassailing through the village focuses on a kind of jolly-faced exchange between the peasants and the landlord class: here we’ve come to wish you well (wassail comes from Old English, and means “be thou hale”), oh—and have you got any food and drink on you? Great. Hand it over.

This explains all the verses in the song about wishing the master all the best: a good year, a good piece of beef, a good Christmas pie, a good crop of corn, blah, blah, blah. Just the slightest bit on the toadying side, but hey—it’s Tradition.

I especially love this version, by the Utah State University Chorus, because—even though it’s a Concert, they’re having such fun with it. I also love the fact that, it being Utah State, and the composition of the performers and audience is probably heavily Mormon and therefore strictly tee-total, they’re totally delivering on the progressively tipsy nature of the piece.

I wonder if by the end of this their ale it is white and their toast it is brown…

As for me: I am not out contributing to traffic jams and jostling wild-eyed shoppers. Today is my day to hunker down and power through many batches of candy. Then I’m taking a blow torch to every surface in the kitchen to get the sugar off of it.