In the dark days last week after what most Canadians agree was a disastrous election, many vowed to dedicate themselves to the things they can control — to life lived small scale. There’s little we can do about the wars, but there is lots we can do in the here and now.

“Be lowly wise” is a kind of mantra for me. It’s a line from John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem about the fall, Paradise Lost. Adam, after eating the apple in the Garden of Eden, is being prepared by a heavenly messenger, the Archangel Raphael, for a new kind of life, one that will take place outside paradise. After Adam has asked one question too many about what goes on up above, Raphael gives some of the best advice one will ever receive. 

Be lowly wise. 
Think only what concerns thee and thy being. 
Dream not of other worlds.

Draw from what you know. A good kind of knowledge. In the olden days, I often remind myself, people didn’t know what was happening elsewhere. Life went on in small, in a neighbourhood. Jane Austen’s recipe for a novel was simple. “Three or four families in a country village,” she told a niece who aspired to the writing life. Everything you need. Right there.

When you limit your horizons to what is right in front of you, both time and place take on a completely different quality. The immediate looms large. This field. Those murderous crows. That weathering barn. These slowly ripening grapes. Everything becomes an effect of its season, an expression of a place and a time. A garden, a tree, a vineyard, in fall or spring or summer, is a completely different thing. 

Seasonal festivals restore us to cyclical, circular, time. The changing of the seasons is predictable and perpetual, like the slow turning of the constellations in the night sky, the phases of the moon, the coming and going of the tides, all suggest life itself coming and going. The eternal returns of cyclical time challenge modern, western ideas, in which time is nothing if not a progress, a perpetual improvement — an ascent. Adam wants to learn everything, to know even Heaven, but Raphael says: resist the desire to travel beyond the here and now. Here is all you need to know. Be lowly wise. 

The thought offers comfort in dark days. I know all I need to know; all I can manage.

It goes without saying that the pagans really knew how to do a festival. Christmas, May Day, Halloween. Even Groundhog Day. They are all still with us, versions of very early folk festivals. All have to do, in one way or another, with the harvest. 

Pagan celebrations of midwinter, as yule, or the solstice, have marked a crucial turning point in the cycle of the seasons since the late Stone Age.  The winter solstice is the hinge of the world, the time between darkness and light.

Further winter festivals coincide with the full moon of the month following the solstice. January is when the sun starts to return, the darkness of midwinter to recede, promising the world will come alive again. From Germanic to Roman tradition, this is the most important time of celebration. 

In England, this was the time to wassail the trees, when everything was dormant. In the apple counties of West England — Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire, famous for their cider — wassailing means drinking and singing the health of the trees. 

One of Milton’s contemporaries was the 17th-century English lyric poet, Robert Herrick, who wrote “Wassail the Trees.” 

Wassail the trees, that they may bear
You many a plum and many a pear:
For more or less fruits they will bring,
As you do give them wassailing.

This is such a simple, brilliant poem. Four lines. All you need to know. Sing to the trees, wassail them, invest yourself in them, and their fruit will become yours. The poem recalls a standard wassailing song, forerunner of the Christmas carol:

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 fills,
Hip, Hip, Hip, hurrah,
Holler bis, holler hurrah.

Here, Wassail is a seasonal, local, small-scale celebration, one that connects the County’s grapevines and apple trees to the turning of the centuries, to people in far different places and times, whose lives also turned around the harvest, the weather, and work. 

The County wineries shifted Wassail from the apple trees in winter to the grapevines in late fall, the time for local vintners to celebrate the harvest come in, all the hard work done, the vines wrapped, ready for winter. Time to invite the neighbourhood in to drink and to sing, to wassail the vines.

As Richard Johnston, of By Chadsey’s Cairns, wrote in these pages last year, “We needed the visitors to come in the darkest, most depressing time of the year, November, and maybe December for good measure.”

“That is when I came up with the idea. We should boldly celebrate our distinctive agricultural reality, stark and cold as it was, and base the closing event of the season on burying the vines. We would not be the first to celebrate shutting down a farm late in the season. That was a thing since the Middle Ages, in the apple orchards of England. Why not adapt that tradition, make it something distinctively our own?”

Mr. Johnston, of course, rewrote the song. 

Here we come a-wassailing among our vines so fine
Here we come a-wassailing to toast with our good wine.

Wassail is on for the next three weekends. Drink some hearty cheer. If the dark days are here, light is on the way.