It’s the best time of the year — or so sings Burl Ives, over and over leading up to Christmas Day. Of course, cups of cheer (spiced cider, perhaps) will likely make an appearance, and (croons Burl) there may or may not be snow.
Lots of Christmastime traditions are easy enough to understand — stockings hung by the chimney with care, for example, have an obvious, convenient, and practical purpose for Santa Claus when he pops out of the chimney.
But back to Burl, who also highlights a truly puzzling one: little sprigs of an emerald-green, white-berried plant, hanging “where you can see,” where someone might just be waiting for you to steal away a kiss. Seems about as quirky as displaying a freshly cut pine tree in your living room.
Mistletoe bears fruit at the approach of the winter solstice, which, according to Ballweg, ancient European cultures saw as a symbol of love, fertility, and perseverance.
Like the Christmas celebration itself, hanging mistletoe in your house is rooted in ancient tradition. But before we get to that, it’s worth noting that mistletoe has no real roots — it’s a parasite, making its way in life by living off of rooted trees. “Mistletoe makes its own sugar, but poaches water from trees,” says Savannah Ballweg, who manages the Miami University botanical conservatory in Oxford.
According to Ballweg, Ohio is home to one species of mistletoe: American mistletoe, also known as oak mistletoe, found mostly in the southern part of the state.
The thick evergreen parasite indeed has an affinity for the larger branches of oaks, but also takes to gum, hackberry, maples, and ashes, particularly along stream courses. It’s at its most visible standing out as a small green globular shrub nestled on larger tree branches after the leaf fall.
More about roots: The word “mistletoe” is rooted in German, from “mist,” meaning feces, and “tang,” meaning twig or tree branch — the little white berries of the plant do resemble something that has passed through the gut of a bird.
Besides being the actual word’s origin, the name, as translated, also explains a little about the parasite’s reproduction. Birds do, in fact, find the seeds to be yummy, and many that pass through a bird’s gut are deposited, covered in a sticky yet nutrient-rich gut-gunk, on tree branches. There, they sprout and send rootlets into the bark, where they tap into the host’s water and mineral nutrient supply.
Despite having evergreen leaves, they do little photosynthesis — and that is mostly in winter, according to Ballweg. “They carry some of their own weight,” she says. “Mistletoe does not kill host trees and lives a remarkably long time, up to 100 years.”
Mistletoe bears fruit at the approach of the winter solstice, which, according to Ballweg, ancient European cultures saw as a symbol of love, fertility, and perseverance.
And that, then, lends to the kissing tradition, though the full story comes from the Norse myth of Baldr, the god who was done in by an arrow made of mistletoe. Baldr’s mother, the goddess Frigg, cried tears that restored him to life, and those tears became the white mistletoe berries. Forever afterward, the grateful mom granted a kiss of her protection to anyone who passed under mistletoe.
Kissing under berry-laden mistletoe, then, was one of the pagan traditions that northern Europeans brought with them when they converted to Christianity. Holly (as in “have a holly-jolly Christmas”) was another. Also, as a way to ward off evil spirits around the time of the winter solstice, they often decorated their houses and barns with — you guessed it — freshly cut evergreens. Not so quirky after all.
