Wassailing and the Lohri Festival

Lovely to see so many people willing to come out on an overcast and chilly day to help us celebrate the Lohri Festival and Wassail our fruit trees! Thanks as always to the wonderful Prakash for providing the gorgeous food, and to Mark for bringing his drums to provide the heartbeat.

It was a good day for learning too. Tracey began the day being interviewed about what we were planning on Radio Nottingham, so at least 1 listener learned about the session and came to see what we were doing. And Tracey learned she's been saying "Lohri" wrong for quite a while - apparently it should be pronounced "Loiyi" - so hopefully she'll get it right next year! 

Making tickling sticks to use to wake up the trees.

Tracey leads the Wassailing

Adding the heartbeat.

Wishing you all a good Lohri and Wassail!

Wassail! And a good Lohri to all of you. If you are now thinking - "What on earth do they mean?!" then have a look here and here. What we mean, essentially, is that we got the new year at Windmill off to a great start by celebrating the harvest in the Punjab and celebrating fruit trees and looking forward to their harvest in Nottingham.

Hugh Miller's great photo from last year.

It actually all started with the wonderful Hugh Miller last year, who took such a lovely photo of us wassailing our Victoria plum tree, which helped us to advertise today's event - it got us even more interest than usual, including a mention in a Nottingham Post article and a mini documentary which is being made by a media student for their course! 

And this morning, the very wonderful Prakash who has been a mainstay of this event since its inception, got up at 4am to make us huge vats of gorgeous curry, vegetable rice and the kind of rice pudding that made everyone close their eyes in ecstasy when they tasted it. Then this afternoon, Jo, Kathy, Cicely, Shanaz, Ash, Jeremy, Claire and lots of lovely folk from Nature in Mind prepared fires, warmed the food and set out the kit to make ivy crowns for their hats, tickling sticks, and milk-bottle birds (just for fun). We provided wooden disks for people to write things they wanted to forget from 2017 and then burn them in the fire (or keep if it was a good memory). 

Getting the fire going at the main pidand starting the drumming

And then lots of lovely people turned up and had a great time getting ready for the wassailing, enjoying the food and then helping us with the actual wassail bit. We also had Mark Scoones who brought his wonderful drums for people to sit playing around the fire, and Cicely and Ash had prepared lots of sticks to use to toast marshmallows and toast on, which were very well used.

The second fire-pit - and the spring broccoli in blue!

Then came the wassailing. Tracey, Jeremy, Dianne and Derek have been practicing a bit since last year (ok, for the last week!), and actually did well enough to help the assembled folk to learn the Carhampton Apple Wassail. If you click on the link, you'll be able to hear it too, and we were thrilled that quite a few of the crowd had already done this as we'd shared it on Facebook, so we did the Apple tree proud, singing to it, putting toast in the branches, soaking the roots with apple juice, tickling it with the specially made tickling sticks, shouting "Wassail" and making a lot of noise with a huge variety of noise makers, from vuvusalas to ox-horns! Then we went on to wassail the old Victoria plum in the stone-fruit orchard over the bridge, which followed a similar pattern but with a different chant and no singing (it seems a bit rude to sing about apples to a plum tree...). On the way back, some of the attendees noted that the pear tree had been left out, so a few of us gave that a mini wassail.

Wassailing Victoria Plum

Here are the rhymes we used:

Carhampton Apple Wassail Song

Old Apple Tree we wassail thee and hope that thou might bear

For the lord doth know where we shall be come apples another year

For to bloom well and to bear well, so merry let us be.

Let everyone take off their hat and shout out to the old apple tree!

Pear and Plum Tree Wassail

Wassail the trees that they may bear

Many a plum and many a pear

For more or less fruits they will bring

As you do give them wassailing.

As usual, many stayed to enjoy the atmosphere for a while longer, and we realised we'd managed to persuade well over 50 people to spend a couple of happy hours in the fresh air on a dull January day, so hopefully a job well done. We'll see if the trees feel the benefit! 

Thank you to everyone who helped make our first festival of the year so successful.

Old Twelfth Night and Lohri Celebration

A chilly Windmill this morning

When we woke up on Sunday morning to a thick, white blanket of snow, we wondered how many folk would brave the cold to come and join us for our Old Twelfth Night and Lohri Celebration, but we needn't have worried! Lots of hardy people turned up and, by all accounts, had a lovely time (thanks for the great Facebook feedback!)

Folk like to congregate around the food area!

It's a favourite event of ours at Windmill, because we celebrate Lohri, which is a wonderful Winter festival in the Punjabi community (celebrating the harvest and longer, warmer days), and we've added in Old Twelfth Night - when it's traditional to wassail fruit trees in England. Mix the two traditions and you have a recipe for a great party.

Panorama of the site, showing our two fire pit areas - drumming at the bottom,
popcorn and feet-warming at the top!
Kitchen and lovely food at the left were also very popular!

We are extremely luck that the lovely Prakash has embraced the idea, and as she has every year since we started, provided us with lashings of delicious curries, puris and desserts, whilst her grandson entertained us with his dhol drumming. The vast vats of food disappeared remarkably quickly as everyone got in the mood, joining in the drumming (thanks to Mark from Nature in Mind for providing a great set of mixed drums and playing along) and stoking up the fires.

Prakash with Tracey

Making crowns and wands

Whilst all that was going on, it gave us time to make "wassailing wands" for the children and ivy "crowns" for anyone that wanted one (which seemed to be almost everyone!) as well as toast (of which more later). As we'd asked folk to bring something to make noise with, most people were already prepared, but we provided drums or a few odd noise makers to those in need and set off to wassail the trees. Ni, in her fabulous psychedelic cloak, led the ceremony as the children used their wands to tickle the trees awake. We joined in with wassailing rhymes, then all made a huge din as the children soaked toast in apple juice and hung it from the trees (to attract birds to come and eat the moths).

Wassailing the apple tree.

Ni leads the wassailing of the plum tree

Putting toast on the branches

One of our volunteers with her wassailing stick

Toast on the branches

Our youngest wassailer!

If you have a look on Facebook, you might even see a video of the proceedings.

We would like to thank Prakash and her grandson for their generosity, as well as Mark for drums, Kathy for running the kitchen and making the best mulled apple juice we've had, also to Ray, Hassan and the Rushton clan for their help in fire-starting, setting up, feeding and watering folk and tidying up. And a big thank you to everyone who brought their own mug, which made a huge difference to the amount of washing up we had to do!

No-one wanted to leave the washing-machine
drum fire-pit!

Old Twelfth Night, Windmill Style!

Drink can lanterns on the pear tree

What a fab afternoon of celebration at Windmill today! The day started very icy, so we were greeted with an amazing display of ice-crystal ferns in the kitchen when we arrived!

Nature adds it's own decorations!

Making popcorn and toast on the fire

This year, because of the date, we decided to combine a celebration of the Lohri Festival with the Old Twelfth Night tradition of wassailing our fruit trees. This meant we still enjoyed wonderful Punjabi food (thank you to Prakash and her family for the delicious curry and also to Steven who provided yummy pakoras for the late comers), Punjabi style and other style drumming, and eating popcorn and ravri around the fire, but we added the twist of wassailing and a few Twelfth Night traditions. If you'd like to know more about the traditions of Lohri - check the info here - but it is essentially a changing of the year, and looks forward to the indian wheat harvest, as well as being a celebration of the life of the Robin Hood of the Punjab, Dulla Bhatti (find out more about this extraordinary man here). 

Drumming around the fire

Pete and his amazing drum box

Wassailing is a tradition which dates back to Anglo Saxon times, which is where the term comes from – waes hael meaning “good health” – and is a pre-Christian tradition that gradually evolved into carolling, and the tradition we are continuing today of wassailing our fruit trees. Wassailing fruit trees was especially popular in the South and West of England, but this may be linked to these areas having a lot of large orchards. The tradition, sometimes called “howling” involves lots of variations, but the main themes are:

- Spilling apple juice or cider onto the tree roots

- Hanging toast (sometimes soaked in cider) in the branches of the tree

- Calling on the tree, with a rhyme, chant or song, to have a good crop in the coming year – sometimes under threat of being dug up or cut down if it doesn’t!

- Making noise around the trees – (maybe to wake them up or to scare away evil things?)

We had a go at all of these, and it worked rather nicely, with everyone enjoying a communal "wassail" of the apple tree, then the pear, and finally our Victoria plum (though some lovely students from NTU did a quick "free-lance" wassail of the other trees in the orchard after we'd finished).

Add caption

The apple tree gets first treatment

It was great to see so many happy folk, and thanks to all the volunteers who helped to make it work, especially Prakash and her family, Steven, Pete for the drumming, Kathy for all her help, especially drum-wrangling, Ash for sawing wood, Rowan for fire-tending and his Jo staff display, Jeremy for the photography, and washing up, Joyce for helping with the lanterns and mince pies, Mark sorting out the popcorn and Matt and Carla for great help with the tidying up.

Rowan with the Jo Staff

Here are the wassailing chants we used - just of a few of many we could have chosen.

Apple Tree Wassail

Apple tree, apple tree, we all come to wassail thee,

Bear this year and next year to bloom and to blow,


Hat fulls, cap fulls, three cornered sack fulls,


And a little heap under the stairs – hurrah!

Pear and Plum Tree Wassail

Wassail the trees that they may bear

Many a plum and many a pear

For more or less fruits they will bring

As you do give them wassailing.

So we wish you all good health for the coming year, like our trees. Wassail!

Add caption