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BOUNTY: A Toast to Mischief

It may come as a bit of a surprise, but it’s true: The early Americans who arrived here on the South Fork in the 1640s, despite being of Puritan stock, got fairly rowdy each December. Have you heard of wassailing? If you’ve ever been Christmas-caroling the word might ring a bell, from the most famous wassailing tune that remains among the seasonal canon, “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” It is pretty much all that’s left of a centuries-old, possibly millennium-old Yuletime tradition: