Stories under the mistletoe
When I was growing up, we had a piece of plastic mistletoe that my mother would get out every year and hang up in a doorway.
This was long before the days of overnight shipping and priority mail so the real thing just wasn’t available.
It was pretty tacky.
When we asked her about it – none of our other friends did this– she would sigh and say that some day she’d tell us. She did, but not the whole story.
She told me she befriended a young British soldier while stationed as a U.S. Army nurse in Salisbury, England, and that’s when she first encountered the mistletoe tradition.
It was a beautiful wartime love story, but it ended with D-Day and the distance across “The Pond.”
Yet through all the years they stayed in touch and when I finally visited her soldier friend in England, he was the one who really filled me in on the details more than 50 years later.
My mother’s love story is one of many tied to the myths, legends and facts that have followed mistletoe through the ages.
Mistletoe Myths
Mistletoe’s association with love probably came from the legend of the Viking god Balder, who dreamed that he was going to die. His mother Frigga, the Norse goddess of love and beauty, went to each of the earth’s elements – fire, water, air, plants and animals – and asked them not to harm Balder. However, one of Balder’s enemies found a loophole in Frigga’s request and tricked Balder’s blind brother into killing him with an arrow made of mistletoe.
For three days all of the elements tried to revive him with no success until Frigga’s tears turned the red berries of the mistletoe to white and in doing so, raised Balder from the dead. Frigga immediately began kissing everyone under the mistletoe in gratitude, and thus it became a symbol of love.
Mistletoe has inspired many other myths and legends.
In the first century A.D., near the winter solstice, the ancient English druids cut mistletoe from the tops of oak trees with a golden blade, blessed it and handed it out to ward off evil. Because of its association with the druids, the early Christian church banned its use.
Mistletoe was also thought to affect fertility and serve as an aphrodisiac in early cultures across Europe. The sap of the berry was thought to have a sexual connotation while the plant’s perceived ability to spontaneously grow from other plants created an aura as a magical plant with special powers.
Mistletoe Facts
Mistletoe is not a normal plant. It is a parasite which in botanical terms means it must live on another plant to survive.
Mistletoe is an evergreen shrub that grows on the branches of hardwood trees such as apple, ash and oak. Birds eat the seeds and then deposit them on other branches as they travel through the forest. The seeds germinate and send roots into the branch of the tree for support, water and to a certain extent food.
Mistletoe is native to both Europe and Eastern North America. The mistletoes of the myths and legends are Viscum album with white berries, and Phoradendron flavescens with red ones. American mistletoe, Phoradendron leucarpum, also has white berries.
The mistletoe of the Christmas season should not be confused with the dwarf mistletoe we find in the forests of the Western U.S. Our region’s dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium spp.) is a parasitic cousin of the Christmas plant that grows on ponderosa, lodgepole, limber and pinion pine and Douglas fir instead of hardwood trees. However, it is much smaller than the other mistletoes, leafless and spreads by forcibly ejecting its seeds away from the plant rather than by bird droppings. The seeds drift onto new plants and slowly spread the plant. Over time major infestations can affect the growth of the trees and even kill them.
Because conifers are an important economic resource of the region and our dwarf mistletoe doesn’t have the likeable reputation of its cousins, it is considered a major pest of forests and difficult to control once it is established.