Joy be to you

Since we’re halfway through the second week of Advent, 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.

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 the drink 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, raising a ruckus 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 songs 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.

Our wake-up-and-smell-the=mulled-wine offering today is by Appollo’s Fire, a baroque orchestra in Cleveland. They look like they’re having a good time.