Advent Calendar: Day the Fourteenth

Excuse me, your majesty! I appear to have rumbled the king on his throne. Happy 14th December.

I arrived in Vietnam on a Thursday. The 1st of October to be precise. So this weekend just gone marks something of a record for me; whether you want to measure it from the Thursday or from the new week, the feeling has been the same. After eleven or so weeks in Vietnam, it's the longest I've ever been away from home.

It might be a surprising thing to say as a twenty-four year old who has been teaching English abroad for over two years, but when I was in Austria, I had all the regular school holidays, plus odd weeks here and there where there was no work, and the wonderful English in Action (the company that I worked for) would fly me home after every contract and out again for the start of the next. The flight took all of two hours, if that. Sure, there were a few early morning Ryanair flights to Bratislava, but in retrospect it was unbelievably cushy.

So I never went very long at all without at least a week back in my sleepy old home town of Birchington-on-sea, and to be away for so long, and especially over Christmas, my first away from home and family, has been hard. Harder than I expected, despite having always considered myself fairly self-sufficient and happy enough with my own company.

I've met some great people here, and they've been fantastically supportive, but it's still quite a big thing to have to go through, especially on some of the most demanding weeks of the year, what with tests, marking and reports, as well as covering the lessons of those teachers who have been lucky enough to wrangle some time off to go home.

I haven't been here long enough for such frivolities, and I'm without a proper Christmas holiday at all. The closest I've got is a visa run to Cambodia this weekend. So on that rather melancholy note, I think my feelings are best summed up by this clip from The Lord of the Rings, one of the most most beloved films of my childhood (I was ten years old when this came out).

Sure, they're talking about distance rather than time - I probably crossed the distance barrier at 30 000 feet flying over Pakistan back on the 1st of October, but the sentiment is the same. I have to believe that this new record is nothing more or less than the start of the next great adventure.Sure, there'll be some good times and there'll be some bad times, but I'm bound to come out the other side a better person.

If I take one more step, it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been.

Bizarrely, I've also been analysing the minutiae of the cultural celebrations that surround Christmas in Britain in a way that I would never bother to at home. I started looking into the advent season, and the idea of lighting the candle each Sunday.

Today, I was researching 'wassailing' an Anglo-Saxon custom where people would go from door to door singing and asking for food and drink, a kind of carol-singing/trick-or-treat which survives in the modern practise of carol singing, as well as classic carols such as "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" although the traditional wassail was held on the twelfth night, January 6th (or Januray 17th, 'old twelvey' if one wishes to keep to the pre-18th Century Julian calendar).

Folk would also carry a 'wassailing bowl' from which they would drink together after receiving mulled mead or cider from the houses visited.

The 'orchard wassail' is also still held in parts of the West Country and Wales, where the wassailers visit an orchard, the trees are blessed, and an offering of sop (bread soaked in cider) is made to represent the success of last year's crop. The blessing drives evil spirits are away and wakes the tree in anticipation of spring and growing the next year's crop.

A good modern version of the traditional 'Gloucestershire Wassail' was recorded by '90s Britpop sensations Blur.

Give me one wish, and I'd be wassailing in the orchard, my English rose...