Soulcake

Mentioned in the Peter, Paul & Mary song "A Soalin'", a soulcake seems to be something for which travelling carolers would beg (see also Wassailing). I was hoping to find out more by looking this up in Wikipedia, but no one had written the article yet, so I started this stub.

When I consult http://www.takeourword.com/Issue020.html, I find the following:

"The Souling Song (as it is called on the 1965 album "Frost and Fire" by the Wattersons) was sung on All Hallows (that is, Halloween and All Souls' Day) by children who would go from door to door asking for pennies and soulcakes. As we see from the lyrics, the children asked for "any good thing to make us merry" but soulcakes were not originally intended for the living. Long before the Christian church gave the end of October and beginning of November the name "All Hallows", it was the Celtic new year. It is thought that the soulcake tradition may be a remnant of the ancient, pre-Christian practice of preparing a final meal for that year's dead. The Celts believed in ghosts and they considered it quite natural for a departed spirit to want to hang around its old haunts (sorry). Equally naturally, they didn't want to keep bumping into spectres of their revered ancestors every time they popped down the mead-hall for a quick one. Thus, on the last night of the year (the Celtic year, that is; our Halloween) the table would be set and the spirits of those relatives who had died that year were invited back one last time. After that they were expected to go and stay gone. [...] The custom of wassailing (or wasseling) is similar in some ways to the soulcake tradition – you knocked on your neighbors' doors, sang a special song and received gifts. In this case the singers were usually adults and the gifts were a little more grown-up: mostly beer. Wassailers were thought to be luck-bringers and they sometimes carried an elder bough bedecked with ribbons to signify good fortune. [...] Unlike the souling tradition there are many wassailing songs, the most well-known of which is called "Here We Come A-Wassailing". The tune for this song is known in various forms right across Europe from Ireland to the Balkans and is usually associated with midwinter."