Wassailing the Rittenhouse Way

Imagine a snowy Victorian Christmas – festive red-and-white Christmas decorations and a gorgeous tall pine tree nestled next to a sweeping staircase decorated with delicate glass ornaments.

The scents of evergreen and cake waft through the hallway. Laughing people chat over amazing food and black-tied carolers fill the hall with the sounds of traditional Christmas music.

You have just imagined yourself into a Wassail Concert dinner in the Landmark Restaurant at the Rittenhouse Inn in Bayfield, Wisconsin.  

Wassailing, a word that comes from the mulled hot drink called “wassail,” has two interpretations, both festive:

1) eating and drinking plentiful amounts of food and alcohol while enjoying oneself with others in a noisy, lively way, or

2) going from house to house singing carols at Christmas.

The two apply at the Rittenhouse Inn during its wassail season, though carolers spread Christmas cheer by “wassailing” not from house to house, but from table to table in the inn’s ample Victorian-themed dining rooms.

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How To Go A-Wassailing

Wassail lunch and evening concerts at the Rittenhouse Landmark Restaurant run the three weekends before Christmas. Tickets can be reserved by calling 715-779-5111 or logging onto www.rittenhouseinn.com.

Wassail lodging packages for two include a dinner concert performance, full breakfast the next morning and a special gift from the innkeepers delivered to your room. Special rates for groups of 35 or more also are available.

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The inn’s wassail tradition started in the mid-1970s after Jerry and Mary Phillips bought the house.

The Madison-area couple had full-time-plus work in the city and had already rejuvenated a Victorian house there when the Rittenhouse property became available in Bayfield. The Lake Superior town was a frequent summer destination for them.

“We actually were music teachers, performers and church musicians,” Jerry says. Mary played organ for two churches in Madison and Jerry led the choir at one of the largest churches in the city.

The Rittenhouse property, another Victorian to restore, would be their summer home, the couple decided. The price was right; the region was down on its luck with lumbering, commercial fishing and brownstone quarrying on the decline while the tourism industry had yet to make a comeback. (Tourism had been important during the 1800s).

Jerry and Mary love Victorian-style architecture and enjoyed restoring their first Victorian in Oregon, Wisconsin, near Madison. “I suspect it was a couple of things,” Jerry says of their love for the style. “One, just this amazing space that they designed. All of these marvelous little corners and spaces.”

And then there was the craftwork; builders of the period took advantage of the highly skilled immigrant labor willing to work cheaply to get work in their new country. “Amazing craftsmanship,” Jerry says.

In the 1960s, during a time of plastic, chrome and laminate, Victorian homes sold cheaply and saving them became a mission for Jerry and Mary.

When they bought the Rittenhouse property in 1973, though, they hadn’t counted on the oil embargo that started that same year. Heating bills skyrocketed, and they had to search for a way to keep the house without cutting it up or killing the Victorian attributes.

“Renting out rooms was that way … because you could really leave it not only intact, but enhance it,” Jerry says. In summer, when they did not teach school, the couple had guests full time. During the school year, though, logistics proved challenging.

“I would leave school at 3:30 on a Friday. I would drive madly to Bayfield to meet the guests, who were sitting on the porch waiting.”

After hosting Friday and Saturday evenings, he would finish cleaning the rooms and doing laundry on Sundays, then drive back to Madison.

“We’d realized we’d started a monster.”

But it was a monster they loved, and so when Madison’s school district no longer allowed husbands and wives to work together in the same schools, they decided to move to Bayfield so they could work together on their inn.

“Some couple’s marriages survive because they don’t work together,” jokes Jerry. “We loved working together.”

They started by serving breakfast at the inn (this was before the rise of bed-and-breakfast inns). Eventually they put an addition on the house for a larger kitchen and started their restaurant.

They decided to change the menu each week, having them done in calligraphy.

“They never arrived in time,” Jerry laments of the ever-changing menus. So, typical of this “can-do” couple, they adapted, just as they had when the heating bills grew too large. “It’s that eternal optimism,” says Jerry. “There are no answers that end with ‘No.’”

The solution? “I sat down and memorized the menu and started giving it verbally.” The spoken menu was a fond feature of the restaurant until about 2000.

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Returning to those Wassail Concerts, that idea also grew out of Jerry and Mary matching their desires and needs.

Not long after buying the Rittenhouse, Jerry and Mary decided on a very quiet Christmas at home with their son, Mark. “Christmas was always a frantic season for us in Madison.”

But the teacher/musicians missed that musical interlude the holidays brought. “We were so depressed when Christmas was over. It was such a big part of our lives before then. We decided the next year we would create something of our own.”

Armed with Mary’s family recipes and music from both of their past jobs, they went wassailing. “It was that winter that we then started the Wassail Dinner Concerts. It was our one musical event after being immersed in music, particularly at Christmastime.”

Jerry formed a group of community singers, and the couple planned a massive feast. The Rittenhouse was decked out in Christmas glory. “We just did one dinner and one concert. It was magical from that moment.”

The concerts grew in popularity and more were added. At their peak more than 30 concerts were held in a single year. This year 12 are already planned, with additions possible should the reservations and need arise. Jerry, who directed the regional Chequamegon Choir, found a good pool of professional-quality singers to tap. “I always teased that I stole the best singers.”

Jerry and Mary patterned the events after “Tudor dinners” they’d attended in Madison. There people dressed in medieval gowns and ate dinner while singers sang old Tudor-period songs.

“We were very familiar with those,” Jerry says. “Our idea was a much more intimate version, and we really didn’t want to eat with our fingers. We decided to update the idea and so ‘Wassail’ was born.”

People started to make the Rittenhouse’s Wassail Concerts part of their holiday tradition, even if Christmas wasn’t. “It goes across beliefs,” says Jerry. “Jewish people enjoy the wassails, and I’m sure agnostics would, too.”

One frequently attending couple, when they moved to Texas, continued to return to Bayfield each December to attend a concert.

“It’s been such an incredible, wonderful thing, but it’s also a good business move,” says Jerry. “This is a quieter time in the winter. The dinners are a reason to come up, a reason to stay. … We wanted it to be a benefit not just to the Rittenhouse, but the whole region.”

With an increased emphasis on holiday events in Bayfield, Ashland and Washburn, he feels that benefit is growing.

One amazing aspect of those early wassail dinner concerts actually was Mary. She played the piano for many of the songs. Oh, and she also made the dinner.

“There she’d be at the piano – she’s a wonderful pianist – then she’d disappear into the kitchen,” Jerry recalls with a chuckle. “She’d have it all organized and her staff would be in there while she was performing, getting the salads ready and the soups out.

“When she finished the whole salad course, we’d quickly gather and do four or five songs with the piano and then she’d go back into the kitchen to do the entrees.”

This pattern repeated at other musical holiday events – like Valentine’s Day and a harvest concert.

“The joke was, ‘Mary, take your apron off.’”

The solution was that people made and gave Mary appropriate aprons for each occasions so if she forgot to take them off, she was still dressed appropriately.

These days, there are two pianists that split the duties of the concerts. (It took two to replace Mary as a pianist, Jerry observes, and now there are six or seven chefs to replace Mary as chef.)

Many of the Wassail Concert songs are a cappella. Getting into the three quartets – which juggle singers depending on schedules – requires an audition followed, for those chosen, by what Jerry calls “six grueling rehearsals.”

“It’s a professional choir; it’s not a toy. We have 30 singers. We draw them from Duluth and Superior and from Hayward and beyond. One singer drives back and forth – this will be her third year – from Madison.”

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While music provides the beautiful evening flair, the focal point of each Wassail experience remains the food.

“Mary’s mom had incredible recipes and menus for Christmas,” Jerry says. They mixed tried-and-true recipes with new dishes that Mary found in her cookbooks. A brave woman always, Mary often made recipes for the first time and served them at wassail without testing them.

Over the years, the wassail dinners have grown into a five-course feast emphasizing local ingredients from Bayfield-area suppliers.

The evening begins in the inn’s gorgeous Victorian dining rooms with a first course of soup. Then the wassail singers, led by Jerry, begin their caroling, moving to each room. The five-course meal is punctuated throughout with carols, and diners are encouraged to lend their voices in between the salad and sorbet.

Before serving the main course – often a signature pork dish – the singers gather for a highlight of the evening – the traditional presentation of the boar’s head.

They break into “The Wassail Song’ – “Here we come a-wassailing” – and Jerry, with dramatic flair, kisses the paper maché boar to the delight of all.

At the end of the evening, figgy pudding is brought out as one of the dessert options. Everyone is encouraged to join in “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” as the rum center of the pudding is lit and the flaming dessert is carried from room to room by a caroler.

The Rittenhouse mounts Wassail Concerts as luncheon or evening events, with fewer courses served in the afternoon. At the end of each concert, guests will either retire to their luxurious rooms at the inn or drive home. Many make reservations a year ahead and some come nearly every year. Sometimes the second generation of a family has made it their tradition.

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In the Phillips family, the second generation of innkeepers has started.

Mark and his wife, Wendy, are taking over the inn and Le Chateau Boutin, another Queen Anne Victorian house in Bayfield bought by the Phillipses.

Mark, who essentially grew up in the Rittenhouse, often playing with his Star Wars action figures under the grand piano, surprised his folks by expressing interest in taking over the family business.

“You can’t image our elation and surprise when he and Wendy came and said, ‘Had you thought about us being part of the inn?’” recalls Jerry. “We needed to think about this like three seconds. They’re marvelous. I really think it’s their dream now.”

For his part, Mark says he always knew he’d return to the inn, and Wendy is a natural at managing and organizing the weddings and special events that go with innkeeping. “Wendy is probably more indispensable than I am here,” he says.

Mark was about 5 when the family began working the inn full time. They lived in the house and so he remembers his mother’s admonition: “Markie, be quiet as a mouse. We’ve got guests tonight.”

Many current guests remember him and his action figures under the grand, which is now at the Chateau. Fewer probably remember an amusing incident when Mark, an enthusiastic youngster, donned his Zorro cape and raced into the kitchen to show off his hero skills.

“That’s nice, honey,” his busy mom Mary said, “but you have to put pants on.”

Bayfield was a childhood of safety, of playing on the Lake Superior beaches and docks, and remains that way today for his children, Mark says.

Mark, who is an accomplished musician on guitar and has his own band, foresees Wassail Concerts remaining a part of the Rittenhouse tradition as long as a Phillips is running the inn. “I don’t think it would be Christmas without wassail even today. It sets that holiday feeling for all of us.”

Mark admits that his dad’s leading of the singers might be hard to follow – “It’s just the way he rolls into the room with that tambourine and shouts out, ‘Wassail!’” – but Mark’s willing to take on the tradition when the time comes. “This Christmas material … I’ve been hearing since in the womb. It’s soaked down in me. I think with some coaching from him, I could do it.”

Jerry and Mary are confident he can do it, too, if for no other reason than that the Christmas season itself is charmed.

“That season of love, that season of giving, that season of family, that season of great food,” says Jerry. “It goes beyond the sum of its parts. It’s kind of magical.”

Magical and wassail …

“Love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail, too.”

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Hannah Hudson is a freelance photographer and writer based in Bayfield, where she lives approximately a block away from the amazing smells coming from the Rittenhouse kitchens and was happily able to sample some of the dishes that she photographed for this story.