Today’s Christmas-themed post is all about the mistletoe plant, which had special importance in pagan European times before it became attached to Christian holiday traditions.
Mistletoe is a super fascinating species that evolved from sandalwood, and is a type of parasitic plant. It uses its host plant’s water and nutrients, but can also photosynthesize energy from the sun. With its evergreen leaves, mistletoe stands out in the winter from its host tree, as you can see from the second and third images here of a mistletoe growing on a tree along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The white berries of mistletoe have a sticky substance that enables the plant to spread — birds that eat the berries wipe the seeds onto a future host tree’s branches.
In European pre-Christian tradition, the seeds apparently resembled sperm (Ancient Greeks actually called the plant “oak sperm”) and mistletoe became associated with fertility. The tradition of lovers kissing under a mistletoe branch traces at least as far back to the 1500s in Tudor England, when a frame made from the plant was decorated with an icon from the Virgin Mary, and men and women would kiss under it. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did the custom of kissing under the mistletoe become a regular Christmastime thing.
Source(s): “Mistletoe: the Evolution of a Christmas Tradition,” _Smithsonian Magazine_, Dec 21, 2011, Rib Dunn. “Was Mistletoe Banned by the Medieval Church for Being Pagan?,” James Hoare, Dec 22, 2018, _Medium.com_. Wikipedia. Image from _The Tudor Pattern Book_, A simple 1504, ca. 1520/30.
