The tradition of wassailing falls into two distinct categories: The House-Visiting wassail and the Orchard-Visiting wassail. House-Visiting wassail; caroling by any other name, is the practice of people going door-to-door singing Christmas carols. The Orchard-Visiting wassail refers to the ancient custom of visiting orchards, reciting incantations and singing to the trees in apple orchards in cider-producing regions of England to promote a good harvest for the coming year.

Some scholars prefer a pre-Christian explanation of the old traditional ceremony of wassailing. How far the tradition dates back is unknown but it has undeniable connections with Anglo-Saxon pagan ritual. Of recent times the word Wassail (from the Anglo-Saxon toast Wæs þu hæl, "be thou hale" — i.e., "be in good health") has come to be synonymous with Christmas. The word wassail is old English (OE) and so may predate the Norman conquest in 1066. According to the Oxford English Dictionary "waes hael" is the Middle English spelling parallel to OE "wes hal".The American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition, gives Old Norse "ves heill" as the source of Middle English "waeshaeil". The correct response to the toast is Drinc hæl.

David James Archuleta (born December 28, 1990) is an American pop singer-songwriter. At ten years old he won the children's division of the Utah Talent Competition leading to other television singing appearances. When he was twelve years old, Archuleta became the Junior Vocal Champion on Star Search 2. In 2007, at sixteen years old, he became one of the youngest contestants on the seventh season of American Idol. In May 2008 he finished as the runner-up, receiving 44 percent of over 97 million votes.

In August 2008 Archuleta released "Crush," the first single from his self-titled debut album. The album, released three months later, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart; it has sold over 750,000 copies in the U.S., and over 900,000 worldwide. In October 2010 he released a third album, The Other Side of Down featuring lead single "Something 'Bout Love". In 2011, Archuleta announced he is taking a two-year hiatus to be a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As of February 2012, Archuleta has sold 1,108,000 albums and 3,327,000 tracks in the United States.

Kate Anna Rusby (born 4 December 1973) is an English folk singer and songwriter from Penistone, South Yorkshire. Sometimes known as The Barnsley Nightingale, she has headlined various British national folk festivals, and is regarded as one of the most famous English folk singers of contemporary times. In 2001 The Guardian described her as "a superstar of the British acoustic scene." In 2007 the BBC website described her as "The first lady of young folkies". She is one of the few folk singers to have been nominated for the Mercury Prize.

Rusby was born into a family of musicians in 1973 in Sheffield, England. After learning to play the guitar, the fiddle, and the piano, as well as to sing, she played in many local folk festivals as a child and adolescent, before joining (and becoming the lead vocalist of) the all-female Celtic folk band The Poozies. Her break-through album came in 1995. A collaboration with her friend and fellow Barnsley folk singer Kathryn Roberts was simply titled Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts. In 1997, with the help of her family, she recorded and released her first solo album, Hourglass. Since then she has gone on to receive acclaim in her home country and abroad, and her family continues to help her with all aspects of her professional career.