Hogfather

weeks.
    The custom was referred to by Anaglypta Huggs, organizer of the best and most select group of the city’s singers, as an occasion for fellowship and good cheer.
    One should always be wary of people who talk unashamedly of “fellowship and good cheer” as if it were something that can be applied to life like a poultice. Turn your back for a moment and they may well organize a maypole dance and, frankly, there’s no option then but to try and make it to the tree line.
    The singers were halfway down Park Lane now, and halfway through “The Red Rosy Hen” in marvelous harmony. * Their collecting tins were already full of donations for the poor of the city, or at least those sections of the poor who in Mrs. Huggs’s opinion were suitably picturesque and not too smelly and could be relied upon to say thank you. People had come to their doors to listen. Orange light spilled onto the snow. Candle lanterns glowed among the tumbling flakes. If you could have taken the lid off the scene, there would have been chocolates inside. Or at least an interesting biscuit assortment.
    Mrs. Huggs had heard that wassailing was an ancient ritual, and you didn’t need anyone to tell you what that meant, but she felt she’d carefully removed all those elements that would affront the refined ear.
    And it was only gradually that the singers became aware of the discord.
    Around the corner, slipping and sliding on the ice, came another band of singers.
    Some people march to a different drummer. The drummer in question here must have been trained elsewhere, possibly by a different species on another planet.
    In front of the group was a legless man on a small wheeled trolley, who was singing at the top of his voice and banging two saucepans together. His name was Arnold Sideways. Pushing him along was Coffin Henry, whose croaking progress through an entirely different song was punctuated by bouts of off-the-beat coughing. He was accompanied by a perfectly ordinary-looking man in torn, dirty and yet expensive clothing, whose pleasant tenor voice was drowned out by the quacking of a duck on his head. He answered to the name of Duck Man, although he never seemed to understand why, or why he was always surrounded by people who seemed to see ducks where no ducks could be. And finally, being towed along by a small gray dog on a string, was Foul Ole Ron, generally regarded in Ankh-Morpork as the deranged beggars’ deranged beggar. He was probably incapable of singing, but at least he was attempting to swear in time to the beat, or beats.
    The wassailers stopped and watched them in horror.
    Neither party noticed, as the beggars oozed and ambled up the street, that little smears of black and gray were spiraling out of drains and squeezing out from under tiles and buzzing off into the night. People have always had the urge to sing and clang things at the dark stub of the year, when all sorts of psychic nastiness has taken advantage of the long gray days and the deep shadows to lurk and breed. Lately people had taken to singing harmoniously, which rather lost the effect. Those who really understood just clanged something and shouted.
    The beggars were not in fact this well versed in folkloric practice. They were just making a din in the well-founded hope that people would give them money to stop.
    It was just possible to make out a consensus song in there somewhere.
“ Hogswatch is coming ,
The pig is getting fat ,
Please put a dollar in the old man’s hat
If you ain’t got a dollar a penny will do —”

“And if you ain’t got a penny,” Foul Ole Ron yodeled, solo, “then—fghfgh yffg mfmfmf…”
    The Duck Man had, with great presence of mind, clamped a hand over Ron’s mouth.
    “So sorry about this,” he said, “but this time I’d like people not to slam their doors on us. And it doesn’t scan, anyway.”
    The nearby doors slammed regardless. The other wassailers fled hastily to a more salubrious location. Goodwill to all men was a phrase coined by someone who hadn’t met Foul Ole Ron.
    The beggars stopped singing, except for Arnold Sideways, who tended to live in his own small world.
    “—nobody knows how good we can live, on boots three times a day…”
    Then the change in the air penetrated even his consciousness.
    Snow thumped off the trees as a contrary wind brushed them. There was a whirl of flakes and it was just possible, since the beggars did not always have their mental compasses pointing due Real, that they