The Trees are all bare
Wassail track 7
The 25th Track 13
A fine song from the Copper Family of Rottingdean in Sussex. They call it simply 'Christmas Song'.
Bob Copper sings it solo on the 4 LP set A Song for Every Season and I learned it from Bob’s book of the same name.
According to the late Malcolm Douglas writing on Mudcat the song was
Originally a poem written by Thomas Brerewood of Horton, Cheshire (d. 1748); part, I think, of a set of four called ‘The Seasons’. A setting by ‘Mr Lockhart’ appears in Joseph Ritson, A Select Collection of English Songs: With Their Original Airs: and a Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 3nd edn, 1813, vol III p 153: http://books.google.com/books?id=u-UVAAAAYAAJ
The words are in volume I, page 232 (song LIV), titled ‘Winter’: http://books.google.com/books?id=6a4iAAAAMAAJ
The text appears as ‘Winter’ in The Universal Songster. London: Jones and Co., III, 1834, 163-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=jGQLAAAAYAAJ
At Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads as The Timid Hare
Lockhart’s tune doesn’t appear to be related to the one used by the Coppers or by George Townsend.
All the versions in the Roud Index are from Sussex or Surrey. Although some have different verses to the Coppers none, as far as I can see, retains the second verse from the original poem, which begins “While the peasant inactive stands shivering with cold”. The people who kept this song alive presumably knew that “peasants” rarely had the chance to be inactive (and had more sense than to be so on a freezing cold day).