The folk that make the nation: The cultural associations of the wassail imagined in English news media from 1980 to 2024

Wassailing, the toasting to the good health of the orchard, has become a popular annual custom occurring each January and February over the last 20 years across the UK. As a ‘folk’ event, it has resisted commercialisation and is often organised at a community level thereby ensuring a locally contingent and diverse experience for those attending. The article explores the representation of these community events in local and national newspapers from 1980 to 2024 and how a changing social and cultural context is reflected in the characterisation and reporting of wassailing: Care for the orchards becomes care for the environment; community renewal of a village and workforce become individual renewal and escape from globalised, digital worlds in corporeal and shared activities with strangers; an alcohol-fuelled, serious and adulterated affair for the farm labourers where the ‘virgin’ is placed in a tree becomes an urban, middle-class and family friendly event that reconnects with nature. A milieu of local and diverse practices in wassailing become a set of national-cultural values and a resistance against global politicising and dominating narratives. The article further argues that the exoticisation of wassailing as ‘paganistic’ and ‘ancient’ is re-appropriated into an eccentric element of British and English national and regional identities.