Wassail!

The Village Quire performed at the Globe last night, to a packed house. (I had to ask at the bar how to pay for a ticket, as the lady who usually sits at the door for events wasn't there).
One neighbour who was there had seen the Village Quire a couple of weeks ago, doing the same show, and was so impressed that he wanted to see them again.
The bad news was that the Mari Lwyd couldn't be there - the group that had her live in Llantrisant and didn't want to risk the snowy roads. Mari Lwyd is a horse's skull on a pole, wrapped with a sheet and bedecked with ribbons, which was traditionally carried from door to door in Wales. The party with the mare's head would engage in riddling competitions with the householders to win entry to the house.
The good news, though, said the conductor of the Quire, was that he had been offered a horse's head "and he wasn't a member of the Mafia!" So they may have their own Mari Lwyd for next year.
The evening was a selection of traditional songs, sung a capella, interspersed with readings about how Christmas was celebrated in the Welsh Marches, the Cotswolds and Goucestershire (with one reading from Parson Woodforde sneaked in from Norfolk!).
The songs were a mixture of West Gallery songs (originally sung in the West Galleries of parish churches), folk songs, wassails, medieval music, and plygain, which come from a traditional Welsh church service held before dawn on Christmas Morning.
But was that our Christmas Day, or Old Christmas Day? According to writers like Ella Leather, who collected the definitive book of Herefordshire folklore, many people would not accept the change in the calendar in the eighteenth century, and continued to celebrate Christmas twelve days later, on Old Christmas Day.
It was a wonderful evening of superb music and beautifully read passages from Cider with Rosie, A Child's Christmas in Wales, and various works of folklore. Another neighbour I met there said that this was the evening that he felt Christmassy for the first time this year.