Now You Nowell: The Shocking, Dangerous History of Caroling

Excerpted from Defeating Scrooge

(Sung) 

Here We Come A-wassailing among the leaves so green! 

Here we come a-wandring so fair to be seen! 

Love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail too, 

And God bless you and send you a happy new year, 

And God send you a happy new year! 

Who were wassailers, and what is wassailing, you may be wondering. Wassailers were precursors to carolers, and wassailing was the first form of door-to-door Christmas caroling, but shockingly, it has a dangerous and desperate past. The word derives from a Middle English greeting: “Was Hael: meant “Be in good health.” The original custom was that of someone holding up a glass and toasting a person’s health by saying “Waes Hael” and the taking a sip. The proper response was then for the recipient of the toast to take a sip from their cup after saying “Drink Hael!” The beverage itself was also called wassail, and usually consisted of any variety combinations of spiced beer, mead, wine, or cider, with or without fruit bobbing about in it, and served from a wassail bowl. So, wassail is both a salutation and a festive beverage for toasting one’s health. 

In the hundreds of years leading up to and including the Victorian Era, in England, there was a great divide between the rich and poor. As is well-chronicled in many of the works of Charles Dickens and elsewhere, the wealthy of England controlled the money and the law of the land. Furthermore, the people who wrote the laws were not interested in taking care of the poor among them. The people who were well-off tended to think of poverty as a moral defect. Therefore, if one was born poor, there was almost nothing that person could do to change their status, short of being some sort of a genius like Dickens himself, who suffered the horrors of workhouse child labor while his family was debtor’s prison. Christmastime, however, as Scrooge’s nephew Fred pointed out, was a time when people seemed to “open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them.” 

Taking advantage of this annual, charitable state of consciousness could have meant the difference between life and death for the most meager among them. Therefore, the poor wassailers, often farm laborers or their children (the children tended to yield better results,) went door-to-door at Christmastime. They sang – or wassailed – for their wealthier neighbors and offered them a cup of Christmas cheer from a decorated wassail bowl, hoping for some charitable gesture in return. The bowl itself was commonly made of maple or sycamore wood and was usually the bowl used to serve boiled potatoes at the farm family’s dinner table. The wassailers would decorate the bowl with greenery and ribbons in hopes that their festive efforts would evoke such tenderness from their hosts as to fetch a gratuity of food, drink or coins. Indeed, after trudging through the wind and snow in their pitifully scant garments, these wassailers were often welcomed into the homes to warm up, have some holiday refreshments, and sometimes given a coin that provided some measure of desperately needed relief. 

As the centuries passed, the tradition of the poverty-ravished children wassailing morphed into scenes of brazen, drunken bullies stumbling door to door. The had no cheer to offer by way of a wassail bowl, but, instead, they improvised verses of wassail songs, bellowing out their rude demands. They had many demands, ranging from the famous figgy pudding and alcoholic drinks to household items. Indecent overtures were even howled out to the maidens of the house. The holiday looked more like what we know as modern day celebration of Halloween, Mardi Gras, or St. Patrick’s Day than Christmas; excessive drinking, doors being broken down, fist fights breaking out, rape and even murder! 

In some areas of England and in colonial New England, the police were on high alert from Christmas Eve until New Year’s Eve. The seasonal marauding and the thought of the impending danger at their very door steps repulsed and terrorized respectable citizens, and the holiday was largely blackened for them. The Puritans of England, after overthrowing King Charles I and having him beheaded in 1647, formally banned Christmas! Parliament decreed that fasting and humiliation for Englishmen to account for their sins should be the order of the day on December 25. The Puritans in New England followed suit. Businesses stayed open and church doors closed on December 25. The colony at Massachusetts Bay made it a criminal offense to publicly celebrate Christmas, punishable by a 5 shilling fine. In 1660 the monarchy was restored, and it was once again legal to celebrate Christmas publicly in England. Massachusetts, however, held firm to its ban for many more years. Under the reign of King Charles II, the pressure for Massachusetts to relax its unnecessarily stringent laws mounted, with a threat of revoking the colony’s royal charter. In 1681, the colony repealed its ban on Christmas. By this time, the offending tradition seems to have been forgotten, and he wassailing thugs no longer posed a threat.  

Today wassailing – or caroling – is not only safe, but a festive and noble means to spread holiday cheer. We assure you that The Broadway Carolers embody a spirit of joy and goodwill. We can’t promise that we won’t, musically, request figgy pudding of you, but only as a nod to those early wassailers!  

“Good tidings we bring to you and your kin; good tidings of Christmas (and Hanukkah!) and a Happy New Year!”