Wassail!!

[Gob]

Some lovely images from a traditional English ceremony.

[Lord Jim]

Cover yourself in dirt, and march around with a torch wearing a flower pot on your head...


"Blessing trees with a good crop and frightening away evil spirits", my ass. Looks like just another excuse to get drunk to me....

[Econoline]

Wassail, Alaska? Sara Palin's home town?

[Bicycle Bill]

"Members of the Leominster Morris..."

Morris dancers, eh?  Well, that explains a lot.
You *DO* know what Sir Pterry Pratchett had to say about Morris dancing, don't you?

The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.

It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it's springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again.  The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.

It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded young mathematicians to an inexpert accordion rendering of "Mrs. Widgery's Lodger" and ruthlessly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell.

And it is never danced properly.

Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the world turtle.

And even there, only in one place have they got it right.  It's a small village high in the Ramtop Mountains, where the big and simple secret is handed down across the generations.

There, the men dance on the first day of spring, backwards and forwards, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping.  People come and watch.  There's an ox roast afterwards, and it's generally considered a nice day out for all the family.

But that isn't the secret.

The secret is the other dance.¹

And that won't happen for a while yet.

¹ — the Dark Morris.  On or near the first of Ember there is another dance, the last of the year.  There is no crowd of cheering spectators, no merriment, no music, no sound.  The dancers trade their bright white beribboned costumes for black shrouds and perform in darkness and silence without bells, sticks or swords (or better, with bells of octiron that create a lacy counter-tinkle of silences).  This is the Dark Morris, without which winter may not arrive to complete the cycle, water the land with snow and prepare for the renewal of spring.  Winter begets summer, death begets life, and a city-sized sun that travels faster than its own light needs all the help it can get.

-"BB"-

[rubato]

Yet another excuse to drink beer.

NASCAR
Football
Baseball
4th of July
Wassail




yrs,
rubato

[oldr_n_wsr]

Looks like just another excuse to get drunk to me....

Real alcoholics don't need excuses.