Culture Club's Blockhouse Family Wassail

Name: Culture Club's Blockhouse Family Wassail
Start: 2025-01-11T13:00:00+00:00
End: 2025-01-11T15:00:00+00:00
Location: Blockhouse Park

Schedule

Sat Jan 11 2025 at 01:00 pm to 03:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Blockhouse Park | Plymouth, EN

Ready to take on this year’s Wassail? Bring a pot, pan, stick, or other noisy thing and dress up in green!
When the festivities of December are over, it may not just be the trees that will benefit from a bit of encouragement to come forth from Winter’s slumber.
Join us in the fresh air, to make some noise to wake up and bless the apple trees in Blockhouse Park with a hullabaloo! The Blockhouse Family Wassail is open to all who would like to join this fun, noisy and increasingly popular, winter tradition. The intention is to come together as a community to invite a good harvest for the year to come.
If you haven’t been to a Wassail before; expect mulled apple juice, singing, and noise making. The wassailing, or blessing of the fruit trees, involves gathering to drink and sing to the health of the trees as a group, in the hope that they will provide a plentiful harvest in the following autumn.
Traditionally toast and green ribbons are hung in the branches, and cider poured on the trees. This ancient custom particularly popular in cider producing areas such as Somerset, Herefordshire and Devon, but Kent and Sussex also celebrate what they call ‘Apple Howling’. We have a surprising number of apple trees within the park, but fear not, we won’t be adorning all of them with toast!
Meet us at the Stoke Youth and Community Centre, to practise our songs and maybe adorn one of our headdresses to show the trees how green to become as they grow, ready to process to the trees as a group.
During the two-hour event there will be time spent outdoors waking the fruit trees, before we head back to the community centre to warm up with soup and songs from Seaweed in the Fruit Locker [LINK https://www.instagram.com/seaweedshanties/].

During the fun, there will be some quieter apple-themed activities for children too.
We can’t wait to see you there.
The wassailing doesn’t have to stop at 3pm:
🍏You can bless your own trees or the ones on your way home.
🍏To honour the tradition of roaming from orchard to orchard, you could follow the green ribbons all the way to Devonport Park, for the Soapbox Theatre for more info go to:
https://tinyurl.com/SoapboxCeilidh
🍏Or finally, we are led to believe that singing shanties is thirsty work and that a pint or two whilst sharing more wassailing tunes helps to continue the merriment! We suspect that a few whistles will be whet at one of the villages popular watering holes.