Gratitude Monday: I drink to thee

During my peregrinations in recent weeks, I’ve spent some time thinking about how the world prepares for winter. Trees, shrubs and plants pare back—dropping non-essential leaves and sometimes paring back to the very earth. Insects and reptiles kinda disappear—I don’t know where they go and I don’t care as long as I don’t stumble on the undisclosed location.

Birds and mammals, now—they stock up on food and drink, putting on extra protective layers (the “rings” my colleague mentioned) to see them through the cold months. Humans add in the social element of meals, frequently including games and singing as a way of staving off the cold and dark world around us. Viz. this little toerag:

This brings me to wassail, and to my gratitude this Monday.

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, otoh, 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.

So today I’m grateful for tradition, and for hot spiced wine and cider to get us through the dark and the cold.

There are probably thousands of variants on the “Gloucester Wassail” song, with hundreds of variants on the title. For today’s Advent selection, I’ve chosen the Angel City Chorale. I love this group. If you’ve never heard their performance of “Africa”, you need to do it now. Well, right after their “Wassail Song”.