Christmas Waits

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Christmas Waits were singers or musicians, usually amateur, but sometimes demanding money, who went from door to door over the Christmas period singing and playing carols during Victorian times. They seem to have taken their name from the civic Waits who preceeded them, but were not in any other way associated with them. In Thomas Hardy's "Under the Greenwood Tree", there is a description of the village Quire doing a circuit of the village on Christmas Eve in this way.