Published on Nov 26, 2012 by slatester
Mistletoe has long been the trigger of awkward holiday encounters between unsuspecting people who get caught standing under the hanging bough. How did mistletoe become synonymous with Christmas kissing?
The Druids started it. Mistletoe, a hemi-parasitic plant that grows on trees, was considered a cure-all with special properties. In the Aeneid, the hero brings a bough thought to be mistletoe to the underworld. But the earliest mention of mistletoe’s romantic powers was by Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder, who scoffed at the Druids of the 1st Century A.D. for believing that “mistletoe, taken in drink, will impart fecundity to all animals that are barren.”
It wasn’t until the 18th or 19th centuries that the British started hanging mistletoe as part of Christmas celebrations. In an 1820 story, Washington Irving described Christmas decorations that included “the mistletoe, with its white berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids.” In 1836‚s The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens paints a scene of mass sub-mistletoe kissing: Young women “screamed and struggled, and ran into corners, and did everything but leave the room, until∑ they all at once found it useless to resist any longer and submitted to be kissed with a good grace.” Mistletoe was supposed to bring luck to two people who kissed underneath it and bad luck to those who didn’t.
Some say proper etiquette is to pick a berry off your mistletoe for every kiss and stop when all the berries are gone. Just don’t eat them: Some species of mistletoe are poisonous.
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