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”.
