OT Advent Calendar (& Hanukkah!) Day 5: How Do You Wassail Them Apples

Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around half way through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.

Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.

Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another. 

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Today’s tunes are the “Apple Tree Wassail” and “Don’t Let the Light Go Out.”

If one took a careful look at the additional verses to yesterday’s song, the “Gower Wassail,” one may have noticed that the continued health of apple trees was a particular concern for the singers.

We hope that your apple trees prosper and bear
So that we may have cider when we call next year.
And where you have one barrel we hope you’ll have ten
So that we may have cider when we call again.

The “Gower Wassail” was found among English settlers of the Welsh Gower Peninsula, settlers who came from Somerset, and it is from the same cider producing Dover and Somerset area of England that today’s Wassail comes.

Traditionally happening on the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th, in the Western Church, the final day of Christmas and the day the Three Wise Men came to the Infant Jesus) orchard keepers in England’s southwest would—you know, it was more evocatively said in the Illustrated London News of January 11, 1851:

“On Twelfth Eve, in Devonshire, it is customary for the farmer to leave his warm fireside, accompanied by a band of rustics, with guns, blunderbusses, etc., presenting an appearance which at other times would be somewhat alarming. Thus armed, the band proceed to an adjoining orchard, where is selected one of the most fruitful and aged of the apple trees, grouping round which they stand and offer up their invocations in the following doggerel rhyme: “Here’s to thee/ Old apple tree!/ Whence thou mayst bud,/ And whence thou mayst blow,/ And whence thou mayst bear,/ Apples enow:/ Hats full,/ Caps full,/ Bushels,/ bushels, sacks full,/ And my pockets full, too!/ Huzza! huzza!” The cider-jug is then passed around, and with many a hearty shout, the party fire off their guns, charged with powder only, amidst the branches.”

Here is a version by, yes, The Watersons, complete with a quote from the above, note the title of the album, a nod to the wassailing tradition:

O lily-white lily, o lily-white pin,
Please to come down and let us come in!
Lily-white lily, o lily-white smock,
Please to come down and pull back the lock!

Chorus:
(It’s) Our wassail jolly wassail!
Joy come to our jolly wassail!
How well they may bloom, how well they may bear
So we may have apples and cider next year.

O master and mistress, o are you within?
Please to come down and pull back the pin.

Chorus

There was an old farmer and he had an old cow,
But how to milk her he didn’t know how.
He put his old cow down in his old barn.
And a little more liquor won’t do us no harm.

Harm me boys harm, harm me boys harm,
A little more liquor won’t do us no harm.

Chorus

O the ringles and the jingles and the tenor of the song goes
Merrily merrily merrily.
O the tenor of the song goes merrily.

Spoken:

Hatfuls, capfuls, three-bushel bagfuls,
Little heaps under the stairs.
Hip hip hooray!

I do love the image of the “band of rustics” encouraging the trees to bear by shooting at them in cold, cold January.

Today is also the fifth night of Hanukkah. I’ll turn it over to my great friend Cantor Jessica Epstein of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, New Jersey.

From the Christian Science Monitor Article, “Peter, Paul and Mary bring a song for peace to a divided Israel.” June 24, 1983:

“The song was originally written by Peter Yarrow (Peter of the troupe who is Jewish) to express his strong feelings of opposition to the war in Lebanon. According to friends, the group wanted this song to create an impact in Israel similar to that of ”Blowing in the Wind,” the song written by Bob Dylan which became synonymous with youthful US antiwar protesters in the 1960s. ”Light One Candle” was first performed in concert in the US at Hanuka time – the Jewish festival of lights. The song brought down the house. But Peter was dissatisfied, worrying that it was too strident to have wide appeal in Israel. On arrival in Israel he brought it to a leading activist, Janet Aviad, in Israel’s largest anti-Lebanon-war group, Peace Now. ”He asked if we had any peace songs,” recalled Ms. Aviad, a sociology professor at Hebrew University, noting ruefully that while many popular Israeli singers are doves, the more right-wing Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement has been most successful in using music to rouse its followers. But Yarrow also consulted Ze’ev Chafets, a young former head of the Israeli government press office under the present Begin government who had grown up in Detroit in the 1960s. Yarrow’s aim was to weed out any sensitive passages from the lyrics ”so everyone would hear them,” he later told questioners.”

Video of Peter, Paul and Mary at a 25th anniversary concert in 2013 here: