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Re: hey........

From: "Tom Richards" <tcr@quartz.nbnet.nb.ca>
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 14:02:54 +0000
Subject: Re: hey........
To: love-hounds@gryphon.com
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Alan Chamberlin quoth:

> Think back to one of those perennial Christmas carols:  "Here we go
> a-wassailing . . .".  Wassailing is going out and singing Christmas carols
> in public.  In the U.S. we just don't use the word "wassailing."

There's more to wassailing than singing Christmas carols. Wassail is 
a toast to good health (esp. to livestock and nature). It implies 
carousing and drunken revelry. It has come to be associated with 
Christmas (or more accurately Twelfth Night and/or Twelftide) and 
Christianity, but I'll bet it was originally a pagan custom.

T.C.Richards
mailto:tcr@nbnet.nb.ca
Read 'The idea of demonic seduction in Keats and Zappa,'
at http://www.music-planet.com/zappa/fztext/fzessay.html