Hi everyone, welcome to Ansono's History. I am standing in a kitchen next to food

historian legend Annie Gray. Hello and today because it's Christmas we are

cooking the most amazing middle winter fair Wasail which is a beautiful

alcoholic punch and proper mint spice. Annie's gonna take us through those dishes

tell us how to make them, tell us all about Christmas's past and how we end up

with the Christmas we have today enjoy. Annie Gray, great to be back on the show.

Great to be back. It's Christmas one of those things that feels eternal but

most other traditions just basically made up by the Victorians. Yes and no. I

would say most of the modern Christmas certainly was made up by the

Victorians with a kind of spring killing of 1950s as well. The idea of

Christmas goes back a lot further so we look at the window here today and it's

absolutely beautiful. It's a glorious sunshiney day. It's freezing though but

the most normal thing in the British winter is pretty manky, pretty rainy, pretty

miserable. If you're back in the medieval period or before then and your

rural farmer it's got the additional glory of mud. Most of your cattle has been

slaughtered. You can't go out on the field. It's boring, your poor, it's hideous.

So of course the best thing to do is to light a huge fire, get really drunk and

each what you can do and try and forget about your woes and that is something

that you see universally throughout northern climbs. Hideous, foul winter, look

it's really short days, let's get drunk and light a big fire and forget about

everything. And then when the Christian church comes along and starts to adopt a

lot of those early pagan druid, call it what you will, festivals, they go great

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