Bring alongs:
Photos from the 2012 Wassail!!
Offers of fruit or apple cakes most welcome. This is a family event so please join us.
Dressing up to suit a pagan festival is optional.
More details and reminders as we approach the event date.
Time we had another Pagan adventure in the Jubilee wood to celebrate a Wassail. This is an old English custom of celebrating the imminent arrival of spring. As the days start extending in daylight so thoughts turn to how to prepare for spring seeding whether in the cereal fields or the fruit orchards. The Wassail is an expression of looking forward and banishing the winter blues. In the Great Gidding version of a Wassail we mix and match in a modern terminology. We give a nod to the fruit orchards of the south west where Wassailing is still practised in alight hearted way and we also adapt our celebration to include the mixed farming areas of the eastern regions.
Timeline
Light the bonfire of trimmed hedge clipping at 19:30hrs, feel the heat and warm up.
19:45hrs find an unsuspecting apple tree and perform a Gidding Wassail.
20:00hrs assemble by to the bench seat at the entrance to the wood to hear any prose, rhymes, tales written especially for the event. The theme “Enjoying the Jubilee Wood”
It can be serious, light hearted, mischievous, rude, coarse (after all we are being Pagan)
Retire to bonfire for warm up.
The Wassail will conclude at the Fox & Hounds at your convenience. As it is a Thursday you are invited to bring a food item befitting a Wassail to be consumed after light hearted judging at the pub. This will be the weeks “Foodie Thursday” theme that is so popular at the Fox & Hounds. Sweet or savoury, it doesn’t matter and if its not your thing please don’t worry about it.
And……….fancy dress or pagan attire or just a silly hat or a mix of all three.
Due to the recent continuous deluge, it was decided that this year the Giddings Wassail celebrations would be run in a slightly different format.
This not only prevented participants from being sucked into the cold and unwelcoming mud of the Jubilee Wood and the allotments, but also meant we could all keep relatively upright in the warmth of the village hall. It all depended on how much mulled cider you had of course.
Refreshments including homemade nibbles, and beer and cider went down very well and we finally remembered to berate one of the crab apple trees in the car park which should bring us all a plentiful supply of jam next year even if we don’t get any eating apples.
The highlights of the evening included another very eloquent poem from the Giddings Bard, our very own Paul Burgess, who was able to make us smile and nod our heads at the memories of 2012 and that took some doing!
It was amazing to see how quickly recipients of a table tennis bat took to the challenge and almost as quickly remembered the excesses of Christmas as they staggered back to their seats for some light refreshments and bottled oxygen.
Could the Wassail evening encourage the return of the table tennis club we wonder????
Sue Jarvis, January 2013
This is an event that has been introduced over the past few years more to reconnect with our rural history and heritage. The format for the evening has changed slightly. The very wet ground in the Jubilee Wood has meant that we will gather at the Village Hall from 7 pm for a Wassail Celebration at 7.30 pm.
Following on with entertainments of the Gidding kind. Please bring apple based drinks – or anything you fancy really and nibbles.
Drawn to the Jubilee woods by the light of bonfire and waning gibbous moonlight, the villagers once again gathered to join in with the ages old tradition of Wassailing. This year, to aid the abundant harvest of fruit on the trees, the Wassailing performed around the circle of five fruit trees in the wood – including, of course, a cider apple variety. Filling our cups with a wonderful cidery brew we sang, cheered and saluted ‘Waes Hail’! into the night before adding another toast to the tree branches – this time in the form of bread – for the sanity of the birds in the area.
But this was not all….taking steps toward the bench we were most entertained by a very clever and amusing heart-rending poem written and performed by Paul Burgess – dressed in his usual garb of scary white sheet. Sue Jarvis followed with a beautiful poem that she had written with Patrick (read the poems below).
Calamity – A Conversation By Paul Burgess
Greenhouse
How did this come to pass,
That I, a house of glass,
Should fall in shards upon the grass?
Wind
T’was I, the Wind replied
That tipped you over on your side,
And left your framework gaping wide.
Greenhouse
I heard you wield such mighty powers,
Which turn to storm the mildest showers,
But what of Val and her tender flowers?
Wind
I’m afraid I’m not concerned with that.
It is my job to knock things flat
Or set you running for your hat.
Greenhouse
But are you not concerned that this,
A dirty deed which none would miss,
Makes extra labour for poor Chris?
Wind
Why, no! I think you miss the point,
To create mayhem,God did me anoint
And, so, to altogether wreck the joint.
Nature
What you said is nearly true,
But you haven’t really thought it through,
For however hard you thought you blew,
I, Nature, in time will make it new.
And Chris your work will soon undo
After another trip to B&Q
© Paul Burgess
Entry for the Gidding Eisteddfod, 2012
Sue & Patrick’s Poem
Looking back and thinking about 2011
It seems fair to say it was no gardener’s heaven
The winter too cold, the spring too dry
It made us gardeners cry “Why oh Why?”
Allotment holders feared a mass plant slaughter
But wait! At last! The council has put on water!
Hurrah Hurrah we can weather the drought
And we allotment holders can now have no doubt
Our tates will be rounder, our leeks will be longer
Our peas will be greener and our onions will be stronger
Another year is coming to dig and to delve
So lets sing a song to 2012
Festivities continued in the Village Hall with hot soups and a variety of foods and, to bring us bang up to date again, Michael had pasted QR codes around the hall. These Quick Response codes are black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background and when you hold your iPad or smart phone up to them you get information. The evening ended with Paul Crank taking some photos of everyone and instantly putting them on our new Giddings website!
Thank you Michael, Julie and everyone who helped to make this another ‘great’ Gidding evening.
Report by Krystyna – Jan 2012
Wassail night is on the go!
A hardy group of villagers are Wassailing the night away. Firstly in the Jubilee Wood and then onto the Village Hall for food, cider and a warm up!
Everyone’s enjoying the cider!
Paul Burgess is awarded the ‘Ale’d and Aimless’ trophy for his wonderful Wassailing poem. Sue and Patrick were close runners up.
A big thank you to Michael and Julie Trolove (and anyone else that was involved) for organising the event.