Chip Minemyer: Joyous 'wassailing' and a happy new year

Dec. 24—"Here we come a-wassailing, among the leaves so green ..."

One of my fondest holiday memories is of trudging through the snow in the days before Christmas, stopping at homes around our town and joining a chorus of voices sharing songs of the season.

Those church choir or youth-group outings often included a few rowdy choruses of the holiday carol, "Here We Come A-Wassailing."

And we occasionally accepted gifts of cookies or hot chocolate — a very loose connection to the traditions of that ironic Christmas classic.

Reader's Digest tells us that the caroling anthem is "an old English wassail song, or song to wish good health, which is what 'wassail' means."

Technically, the notion of "wassail" refers to making a toast to someone's good health, typically with an alcoholic beverage.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary offers these definitions:

—A wassail is a toast to health, and also can mean "a hot drink made with beer, wine or cider, spices, sugar and usually baked apples, that is traditionally served in a large bowl."

—Wassail can also be a verb, meaning "to indulge in wassail" — to "carouse" — and sing carols from house to house at Christmas.

Reader's Digest goes further with its history of the song:

"In days of yore, the Christmas spirit often made the rich a little more generous than usual, and bands of beggars and orphans used to dance their way through the snowy streets of England, offering to sing good cheer and to tell good fortune if the householder would give them a drink from his wassail bowl or a penny or a pork pie or, better yet, let them stand for a few minutes beside the warmth of his hearth."

The Homes & Antiques website makes the natural connection between wassailing and the great English writer Charles Dickens, whose 1843 novel "A Christmas Carol" continues to resonate each holiday, with plays, films and recitals tracking Ebenezer Scrooge's encounters with three ghosts and his spiritual transformation from a penny-pinching miser into a giving soul on the holiday.

"Scrooge entertains Bob Cratchit with a 'Christmas bowl of 'Smoking Bishop,' " Homes & Antiques writer Luke Honey notes. "Smoking Bishop is a mulled wine, or punch: made from port, red wine, lemons or Seville oranges, sugar and spices, popular in Victorian England, and served warm. It was also customary to reheat it with a red-hot poker drawn directly from the fire."

Both Dickens' remarkable book and the tradition of wassailing provide a striking reminder that many people struggle during the holidays.

Just as Ebenezer deals with his "bah humbug" selfish ways while he is surrounded by poverty, the many verses of "Here We Come A-Wassailing" tell a tale of need that is amplified during the coldest days of December.

In addition to the hopes that the new year will be happy and filled with blessings, the extended verses of the song offer these glimpses of reality for the impoverished:

"We are not daily beggars, that beg from door to door; But we are neighbors' children, whom you have seen before."

And ...

"We have got a little purse of stretching leather skin; We want a little of your money, to line it well within."

Then ...

"Bring us out a table and spread it with a cloth; Bring us out a moldy cheese, and some of your Christmas loaf."

And ultimately ...

"Good master and good mistress, while you're sitting by the fire, Pray think of us poor children who are wandering in the mire."

Perhaps because of its references to intoxication and its emotionally sobering message, "Here We Come A-Wassailing" didn't make the New York Public Library's list of the top Christmas carols of all time. ("Deck The Halls" was No. 1.)

Likewise, The Guardian, an independent journalism organization, left the wassailing anthem off its best carols list, while including the gloomy "In The Bleak Midwinter" and the painfully dark "Coventry Carol" — written about King Herod's efforts to protect his throne by having thousands of babies killed.

Not exactly "Joy To The World."

But perhaps merriment wrapped in a dose of reality is the deeper message of "Here We Come A-Wassailing" — and the holiday around which it is shared:

Those who have much should — and, yes, often do — help those who have little.

And those who have little can still find some holiday cheer when among friends and sharing a song.

And perhaps a sip of warm cider.

As the carol says: "Love and joy come to you, and to you, your wassail, too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year."