THAT strong link between the modern day festive celebrations and our more murky pagan past is plainly apparent in some of the popular folk songs being sung around the region this week.

Songs like The Holly and The Ivy, Here We Come a-Wassailing and The Mistletoe Bough have long and mysterious origins that predate TV advertising jingles and even Christmas Carol singalongs. They date from a time when the serfs and vassals would dress up in foliage and earth-based face-paint and wander off into the forest at midnight to give praise to the much-respected deities of the seasons and the woodlands as the New Year turned.

It's said much of these festivities were plundered by the incoming Christians as the centuries rolled on, but their original chants and invocations and legends in song survived in the memories and cultures of ordinary people reared on self-made entertainment, and evolved into what the eminent Victorian academics called "folk song".

These were collected and either chronicled or expunged altogether, depending on the morals and tastes of the times, while a sub-culture of singers and players struggled to keep them alive among those not fooled or entertained by mass-media slop like broadsheets and hymn books.

Eventually this evolved into what I repeatedly refer to in this column as The Folk Scene.

The evolution continues, but on Sunday at Gateshead's Sage, Sandra Kerr, Johnny Handle, Emily Portman and Stewart Hardy will be sharing these songs and stories in that same grand tradition. Face-paint is optional.