Blwyddyn newydd dda!

Happy new year!
Here's a "calennig"  I made this morning. It's an apple* studded with cloves, standing on three sticks  with some greenery stuck in the top. Tradiionally kids in Wales and the Borders would take these around the houses and sing a little song in order  to beg ask for sweets or money.

Customs of this sort, like wassailing, marked the turning of the year from winter towards spring with the promise of new growth and crops after the privations of winter. It seems to me that the apple represents the last of the previous year's harvest and the green twigs betoken the fresh shoots to come. The cloves would have been bought in to spice the alcoholic drinks.

 Some of these traditions are coming back into fashion and there are quite a number of modern versions of the old songs but I like this snatch of Calennig repertoire as recalled by a old woman named Selina Davies born in the 1880s and recorded in the 1960s just up the road from me.

https://museum.wales/collections/folksongs/?id=13

* One of our last russets, very shrivelled now.