Festive traditions in English villages and market towns

By the second week of December, most English villages have gone quiet in a very particular way. The lanes are dark by half four, the pavements glitter with frost, and the only noise is the occasional clatter of someone dragging a wheelie bin out in the wrong week. Then, just as you've settled in for a long, grey trudge towards spring, somebody lights a torch and the whole parish turns out. These are the customs that pull neighbours out of their kitchens in the coldest fortnight of the year — and nearly all of them welcome newcomers, as long as you bring sensible footwear and a bit of cash for the collection.

Wassailing: an excuse to shout at apple trees

Wassailing is the oldest of the winter traditions and, to the uninitiated, the strangest. In cider country — Somerset, Herefordshire, Devon, Kent and the Welsh borders — orchards are "woken" in mid-January, with many villages sticking to Old Twelfth Night on the 17th rather than the modern 6th. A wassail bowl of mulled cider is passed round, pieces of toast soaked in cider are hung in the branches for the robins, and then the noise begins: pots, pans, whistles, shotguns fired through the boughs. The point is to scare off evil spirits and encourage a decent crop.

You can turn up as a stranger and be handed a mug within four minutes. Do wrap up properly, expect loud bangs near your head, and don't be the person who asks whether the shotgun is really necessary. If you have a small child who dislikes sudden noise, stand at the back of the orchard.

Mummers, guisers and the paper boys

Mumming plays are performed in pubs, farm kitchens and front rooms between Boxing Day and Twelfth Night. The cast barely changes across the country: St George, a Turkish Knight, a quack doctor with a bottle of something dubious, and a terrifying figure such as Beelzebub who arrives to demand money. Everyone dies, everyone is revived, and everyone expects a collection at the end.

Some variants are spectacular. In Marshfield, near Bath, the paper boys tour on Boxing Day wearing towering costumes made of hundreds of fringed paper strips. In Haxey, Lincolnshire, the Haxey Hood on 6 January turns a village lane into a good-natured scrum of hundreds of people pushing a leather tube towards a pub doorway. Both are free to watch, both need warm gloves and a willingness to be jostled.

Lantern parades and the shortest nights

Where wassailing is about waking things up, lantern parades are about getting through. Market towns from Ulverston to Truro have built winter processions out of willow, tissue paper and battery-powered fairy lights, usually in the week before Christmas, with a brass band at the front and school choirs scattered along the route.

• Making your own lantern: a willow withy hoop, tissue paper glued on with watered-down PVA, and a jam jar in the base. Allow two evenings to dry properly.
• Lighting: tea lights in a jam jar are traditional, but LED push-lights are safer for children and far less likely to set the school run alight.
• Practical kit: a torch for the walk home, a thermos, and a hi-vis vest if you're at the back of a moving procession on an unlit road.

Carols in pubs, barns and cattle markets

Village carol singing has almost nothing to do with the rehearsed version in church. In the Yorkshire Dales and parts of Derbyshire, pub carols are sung in harmony with the words largely optional, and a few places still hold a "sheep" carol service in a livestock market or a barn. In the West Country, a brass band may squeeze into a corner of the saloon bar and play until the landlady calls time.

These evenings are advertised in the parish newsletter, on the church noticeboard, in the village shop window and increasingly in a Facebook group run by someone whose name everyone knows. Turn up, buy a drink, and if you don't know the descant, sing the tune an octave down and mouth the words knowingly.

Food, drink and a bit of common sense

The food is half the point. A proper wassail bowl is warm ale or cider with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and roasted apples bobbing on top. Mince pies appear at every event from the first Sunday of Advent until at least the end of January, and Twelfth Night brings a twelfth cake with a bean or a charm hidden inside.

A short practical list for anyone new to a village in winter:

• Check the parish newsletter or church magazine — the dates are often fixed by tradition rather than convenience.
• Take cash for collections, raffles and the pub's honesty box for the bonfire fund.
• Arrive early for parking. A village green holds four cars and forty people think they'll be the exception.
• Offer to help. Carrying lanterns, stewarding a road crossing or dishing out mince pies is the fastest way to be treated as a local by next December.
• Say yes to the mug. Refusing the wassail bowl is considered odd, even if it tastes of hot Ribena and cloves.

None of these customs are polished. A lantern will set alight, the hobby horse will fall over, and the doctor in the mummers play will forget his lines and be loudly corrected by a nine-year-old. That is more or less the point. The tradition is not the performance — it is the fact that everybody turned out, in the dark and the cold, to stand in a muddy orchard or a pub car park and make a racket together until spring gets the message.