In autumn of 2015, I began organizing an annual wassail in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. On the Saturday after the University of Chicago’s fall quarter ends, two dozen of us bundle up and stroll together through the neighborhood singing and playing instruments. We sing our favorite old Christmas carols and a selection of wassailing songs, some traditional and some composed by group members. We sing at the doors of several good-humored friends and respected community members, some of whom graciously invite us in to warm up or offer us something to eat or drink, but we also pause to sing for whomever comes out to listen as we go by.
I was introduced to this tradition via the annual Berkeley Wassail, a highlight of the Bay Area folk community calendar since 1981. I loved knowing we were participating in something that was older than modernity, and yet we could contribute our own creativity and energy to it, making it our own. There’s something amazing about being part of a practice both centuries old and vibrantly evolving.
Like most old folk traditions, wassailing has many elements. Old and Middle English sources (700s–1300s) treat the term as a good-natured formula for drinking: At festive gatherings, when one wished another wæs hæl (be in good health), the other would respond drinc hæl (drink in good health); the first would happily oblige before passing the drink to the next with a kiss. In the 1200s, as the custom acquired high ceremony, hosts would fill a large, elaborate wassail bowl that came to symbolize jovial fellowship.
By the mid-1500s, wassailing meant two different Christmastide activities: house-visiting wassailers carried the decorated bowl around to their neighbors, asking in song for festive hospitality or donations and blessing their providers, and orchard wassailers blessed apple trees to bear fruitfully in the new year. From the 1600s, wassail meant the traditional drink (usually hot spiced apple-sweetened ale), the song sung at neighbors’ doors, the whole event, and the resulting high spirits. Wassailing keeps lively company: Many elements of this tradition are mirrored by other British Isles wintertime visiting customs, including caroling, wrenning, mumming, morris and sword dancing, Hogmanay first-footing, plough-bullocking, and the pwnco with Mari Lwyd.
I love how traditional wassailing songs are flavored by the place where they come from. Wassails from cider-producing counties such as Devon and Somerset bless apple trees, while Yorkshire’s, Gloucestershire’s, and Orkney’s only solicit hospitality. Yorkshire’s suggests that the householders are the singers’ social equals, addressing them directly (“Good master and good mistress / While you’re sitting by the fire”) and ordering the butler indirectly (“Let him bring us up a glass of beer”); Gloucestershire’s, however, blesses the master in the respectful third person (“Pray God send our master”) while speaking directly to the butler (“Come, butler, come fill us a bowl of the best”). And where Yorkshire’s wassailers self-identify as familiar to the householders (“we are neighbors’ children”), Orkney’s wassailers are “Queen Mary’s Men,” perhaps reminding us that Scotland’s Catholic minority kept old Christmas customs despite Protestant-led objections.
Hyde Park is better suited to some of these traditions than others. It lends itself well to walking around singing together, playfully soliciting the hospitality of certain neighbors, and offering everyone we see a freshly baked ginger cookie (our substitute for the traditional drink). This apartment-rich, yard-poor neighborhood lacks apple trees in need of blessings, but our hosts have risen to the challenge with creativity and good humor: We have been honored to sing our good wishes to a struggling pear tree, a tiny succulent, a potted ivy plant named Droopy Claude, and a cat tree.
Although we do not present our wassail as a religious event, I know that for some members of our community, participating in it is a way to express deeply held religious commitments. One year, a neighbor caught our attention when she leaned out her window as we went by singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” We gathered under her window to finish the song, and then she asked us to sing “Joy to the World.” She spoke to us afterward with tears in her eyes about the difficult circumstances she had been enduring and the way hearing these carols affirmed and renewed her faith.
Before her death, my dear friend Melody McMahon, who for years served as theological librarian at Catholic Theological Union, loved having the group of us crowd into her apartment to sing some of her favorites. Drawing from her encyclopedic knowledge of carols and hymns and her critical and carefully considered theology, Melody curated a list of songs that described heaven in terms that resonated with her beliefs. I cherish the memory of being in her home and tuning into her theology of heaven as we sang her selections with her. Last December, as we gathered at my place and were about to set out, the group of us sang “Land of Pure Delight” in her memory.
For me personally, wassailing expresses (and attempts to help realize) a prayer of my own. I believe there is a holiness to the work of stepping over our daily social norms to form and strengthen ties of community with people outside our usual circles. There is certainly value to those norms. Ordinarily, we uphold them because we care about protecting everyone’s freedom to go about their business in peace.
But sometimes, we can create together a safe and wholesome space in which it is refreshing and joyful to gently suspend those rules against asking neighbors to host two dozen revelers for an hour, walking through the neighborhood singing enthusiastically, surprising passersby with elaborate expressions of goodwill, and opening ourselves to connecting with them in a sincere, vulnerable way. With our semi-public tradition of music-making, well-wishing, and offering and accepting hospitality, I believe our group sends out a collective prayer to remain open to reaching past our respectful isolation and making new, unexpected connections with the people around us.
I know that prayer is shared by residents of The Fireplace, an intentional community in Chicago with a Catholic core that brings together artists, religious seekers, and social change makers. Last December, we were honored to visit them for the first time, receiving their warm hospitality and gathering around their hearth to make music together. It is my hope that my neighbors and fellow community members will take up the shared work of maintaining this joyous neighborhood tradition and form stronger ties of community for years to come.
As a folk tradition, wassailing belongs to whomever practices it. If you decide to practice it, it belongs to you, too. I encourage you to organize your own neighborhood wassail and to let the many elements of this tradition’s history be your inspiration, not your prescription. Your expert knowledge of your neighborhood can guide you as you think creatively about what kind of wassail would be safe, accessible, and fun for your community, who or what needs blessings for health and prosperity in the coming year, and what your prayer for your community might be.
This article also appears in the December 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 12, pages 45-46). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Charissa Johnson Photography
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