January 24 Steyning Community Orchard
It’s Wassail time again! Saturday 20th January. 2024
The trees in the Community Orchard at the top corner of the Memorial Playing Field are asleep. Wrapped in the cold fingers of Winter and the darkness of a January evening they slumber as stars appear one by one above them.
Not one of them stirred, when an hour ago, just before it got dark, a group of people arrived, talking and laughing and carrying candles in jam jars and set about decorating the trees. They carefully laid the lanterns around the bases of the fruit trees and threaded lengths of string amongst the boughs of a knotted, gnarled old apple tree which stood silently looking across the playing field to the lights of the town just beyond. As the group left, the last of the light seeped from the western sky and night filled up the corners of the orchard.
The trees are asleep.
The word ‘Wassail’ from the Anglo-Saxon greeting ‘Waes hael’ means ‘be hale’; ‘be in good health’. For hundreds of years, people have gathered to go Orchard Wassailing on the eve of Twelfth Night, the 5th January (or in the old Julien calendar the 17th January) to rouse their winter fruit trees into life with chanting and singing; beating the trees with sticks to wake them, praising the trees for past harvests and exhorting them to ‘be hale’ for the coming season and harvest.
Here in Steyning we have taken this ancient tradition and created our very own Wassail. Tonight, will be fun, dark, noisy, and a little bit pagan.
The Wassail, as always, is led by Mythago, a group of Morris dancers dressed in black tatters. They whirl around dancing in the light falling from the windows of the Cricket Club and the master of the ceremony welcomes those who have gathered to celebrate the orchard and to wake its sleeping trees. He leads them towards the top of the playing field and the soft light of the candles around the trees.
As everyone arrives, they circle around the old gnarled apple tree and then the fun begins. The music starts, there is dancing, chanting, singing, the sound of hurrahs and the noise of pans being banged.
The ancient spirit within the tree hears the noise through his dreams, stirs and slowly awakes. The evil spirits dwelling within the tree awake and flee!
Then everyone makes an offering to the tree; a slice of toast dipped in a specially prepared Wassail bowl filled with mead, crab apples, sugar, spices and egg, tied to the strings dangling from the branches of the tree, a token of thanks for the fruit it has borne the previous year and a gift to the tree spirit living within it.
Then with a final roar of noise, the celebration draws to a close and people drift back across the darkened field to the warmth of their homes.
In the orchard the trees shake their branches and murmur softly in the wind and think of Spring.
Come and join us for this year’s Wassail on the 20th January, 2024 outside the Cricket Club at 6 pm.
Donations towards this evening’s Wassail and the upkeep of our orchards would be VERY welcome so please bring some CASH with you.
The trees are looking forward to their wake-up call!