Virtual Wassail - Your Good Health!

Photo from wassail at Bromyard Herefordshire www.bromyardsessions.co.uk

Welcome to the Wassail which traditionally according to the Gregorian Calendar is around the Twelfth Night of Christmas and a time when wassailing historically took place, except it didn't actually happen on 6 January before 1752 when the Julian Calendar was replaced in Britain and all of its Dominions by the Gregorian one.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition continued to use the Julian system which means it is Christmas for them on 7 January 2014...or to put it another way in just two days from now it'll be next Christmas, hope you've done the shopping and got the plum pudding in.
This means of course that Twelfth Night is not until 19th January when wassailing purists in England today still visit houses and orchards in accordance with ancient traditions on the old twelvy night.
Wassailing is a pre-Christain Anglo Saxon custom of blessings and gift giving in the 'bleak midwinter' when times were hard and when a degree of social welfare was seen as a collective responsibility of the whole community.

Wassailing is the invocation of good health as well as a form of mutual aid and wealth sharing.

Here are 'Ed and Will' from the 2010 BBC One television programme Seceret Britian that features 'A Walk Around Britain' with these nomadic minstrels who 'sing for their supper' as they ramble around various locations across fair Albion and also in the Celtic lands that lie beyond.

Here they are singing the the traditional Wassail Song for some odd reason in a cave.  

Below  Ed, Will and a friend are singing the Broadside Ballad Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy a popular song made known to a wider audience in the latter half of the 20th century by the the Copper Family of Rottindean on the southeast coast of England. The popularity of traditional music in England now is I think an interesting sociological phenomenon.  It speaks I believe of renewed cultural identities in England which had generally fallen behind the other countries of the British archipelago in this particular respect, by allowing our musical heritage to become marginalised by other musical forms as good as they may be. 

The interest in English folk traditions in the early 21st century is in no small part I think a reaction to globalism, transnational capitalism, corporatism and a homogenous atlanticism on the one hand, but also to devolution in Britain and the increasing sense of change and of localism and community. 
The understanding that this localism is a shared and diverse one and is organically related to all other localisms is implicit and which puts the traditional music scene well out of reach of jingoism, racism and chauvenism.
Some tangible expressions of that diversity in the English folk revival is manifested in Imagined Village a multicultural roots folk supergroup... an expression of England today a rainbow nation. Embracing of other folk traditions especially the Celtic one we share with many of our neighbours is part of the identity of the English enclave in the World Music movement uniting populations in songs and dances all across the entire globe.

I personally have been a bit of a folknik since childhood so it is particularly encouraging to me as the years go by that there is so much talent around now... preserving and reinterpreting traditional music and making it so popular even corporate fun merchants like Butlins wants in on the act too.

Here are the lads with a Morris Minor Traveller car of the sort my dad had in 1960 (although ours was pale green) - singing Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy  for us..Enjoy!