Here we come a-wassailing Among the leaves so green; Here we come a-wand’ring So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you, And to you your wassail too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year And God send you a Happy New Year.
Put a penny in our cup, and we will sing to you; put a dollar in our cup and we’ll stop singing too;
Love and joy come to you, And to you your wassail too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year And God send you a Happy New Year.
Our clothes, they come from outlet malls, our stick it comes from ground, give us something good to eat, and we’ll make a joyful sound,
Love and joy come to you, And to you your wassail too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year And God send you a Happy New Year.
We are children of your street, and neighbors of your home, never leave a tired soul frozen and alone,
Love and joy come to you, And to you your wassail too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year And God send you a Happy New Year.
Bring us some hot chocolate, and we will drink it up, don’t turn away a visitor who holds an empty cup,
Love and joy come to you, And to you your wassail too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year And God send you a Happy New Year.
A blessing on all you and yours, and the little children all, a blessing on the Christ child whe’er She come to call,
Love and joy come to you, And to you your wassail too; And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year And God send you a Happy New Year.
(note: for today’s poem, I rewrote a few verses to the timeless carol “Here We Come aWassailing”, sometimes called “Here We Come a Caroling”. I hope carol aficianados will forgive me the sacrilige. I was looking at it, in fondness for the tradition of “wassail”, where carolers would go from home to home and get treats or money…and was thinking about possibly singing it as a service or a carol-sing at the congregation. And the verses seem a bit – well, carols often feel antiquated, even though the lyrics tend to change slightly every century or two. But “give blessings to the master and mistress” is language that falls a bit heavy these days; no one has a butler anymore (for the record, I never did); and perhaps most troubling at all “we are not daily beggars” just feels, to me, a little dismissive of the poor. So I kept the first verse and the chorus, and in the subsequent verses of this version tried to utterly modernize it, while retaining something of the bawdy nature of it – a bawdy nature tempered, as it is in the orginal, with both sentimental and religious undertones. And keeping it, I hope, fun to sing. As you may know we UUs are agnostic and theist and atheist and more – I kept the chorus as it is, for tradition’s sake. And anyway this is just one version, verses come and go. Feel free to use, adapt, or utterly disregard)
Rev. Bob Janis 