I have been wanting to visit England for a long time. Perhaps we should schedule our visit for Christmastime. :)
Apologies! I should have done a better job of proofreading.
This sentence:
The evening concludes back “There are no catering or toilet facilities at the farmyard with spiced wassail cakes and English cider.
Should read:
The evening concludes back at the farmyard with spiced wassail cakes and English cider.
Druids.
Pure paganism, and not something to be mixed with Christianity.
"The new vicar had never wanted a picture-postcard parish—or a huge and haunted vicarage. Nor had she wanted to walk into a dispute over a controversial play about a 17th-century clergyman accused of witchcraft, a story that certain long-established families would rather remained obscure. But this is Ledwardine, steeped in cider and secrets. A paradise of cobbled streets and timber-framed houses. And also—as Merrily Watkins and her teenage daughter, Jane, discover—a village where horrific murder is a tradition that spans centuries."
It's the only book in the series I've read so far. They are very thick books, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and have the next two on my bookshelf to read.
Sounds like something from THE GOLDEN BOUGH by Frasier or THE EVIL EYE by Elworthy.
Can THE GREEN MAN or THE WICKER MAN be far behind?
Bookmark
This isn’t really the primary meaning of “wassail,” although it may have been a natural outcome of Christmas drinking ceremonies.
The primary meaning it to wish someone good health in a toast at a winter holiday drinking celebration.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/wassail?s=t
If an apple howls at me I’m gonna howl right back at it.
Then I’m gonna run away real fast. An apple that howls is just odd enough to be taken as a potential threat.
After a year in which our Jonalicious apple tree, already well over the age it should be heavily producing, failed to produce much of a crop, Dad took an axe and led us all out back in the snow to the tree, where he proceeded to threaten it if it failed again while slapping it several times up and down the trunk with the broad side of the axe. We’d never seen him yell at a tree before, or anything else so weird, so it was quite memorable.
The tree produced a bumper crop that year.
While there isn’t much to the threats, of course, it is true that stimulating apple tree trunks by thumping the bark does do soething to the tree to induce heavy flowering...maybe like other plants that try to carry out one last hurrah to reproduce when they are dying, injuring an apple tree triggers a “last hurrah” response without the tree actually dying.
If you want to see the Chanctonbury Morris Men’s Mummer’s Play, St George and the Dragon, performed, they are in Washington every Boxing Day at a pub. Cannot remember which one. Washington is near the south coast. They really are partiers!
I saw the best fruits of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro orchards at dawn looking for an angry dumpling,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of cider ...
Here is a song that might be associated with this. The Watersons, “Apple Tree Wassail.”
In New Orleans, Epiphany also begins the Mardi Gras party season with the first street car that leaves the depot and goes up until Shrove Tuesday.
Living as a modern in this technologically sophisticated age, I often think of our premodern ancestors and how they spent the long winter. Yes, it was cold but there were no crops to be sewn or harvested and there was meat on the hoof to be enjoyed. It was a time for taking stock and to be grateful ... and what better way to be grateful than to enjoy the fruits of one’s labors.
Many years ago I heard a strange fact related that stayed with me as conversational fodder. It may have been Paul Harvey or The Farmer’s Almanac or some similar source but the story teller told of an old New England tradition where, in early spring, couples would run around an apple tree a certain number of times in either a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction, I forget which, and while doing so slap the tree trunk with switches or perhaps rolled up newspapers. The participants also had to be buck naked while doing so.
What struck me was the specificity of the act. How much experimentation had to be performed over the years to determine the exact number of rotations and strikes to the tree, let alone determining that being naked somehow added to the efficacy of the process. Better still, what did Farmer John tell his neighbor who happened upon him and his female partner practicing this research, and, how did Farmer John convince his neighbors that this was something that the whole village should commence to do together to insure a better apple crop ?
It certainly sounds like apple howling, although the naked bits add a little something extra.