I’m tempted to suggest that kissing under the mistletoe has gone out of fashion in recent years, but on reflection that would be a lie. The truth is it never was in fashion during my lifetime, at least not in any social circle of which I was a member.
The custom always seemed to be more a thing that happened in English sitcoms than in Irish real life. And even in England, where it may have reached its apogee in the late 18th century, it appears to have been dying out ever since.
Here’s John Clare, in his poem December, waxing nostalgic about its heyday:
“The shepherd now no more afraid/Since custom doth the chance bestow/Starts up to kiss the giggling maid/Beneath the branch of mizzletoe/That neath each cottage beam is seen/With pearl-like berries shining gay/The shadow still of what hath been/Which fashion yearly fades away.”
That was in 1827. Decades later, even if the practice lingered, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was lamenting primly the “correct procedure, now seldom observed” whereby the number of kisses sanctioned by a spring of mistletoe was strictly capped, via the plucking of a berry for each one.
The traditional rule that a maiden could not refuse a kiss if she found herself under the plant is obviously problematic in the #MeToo era.
But it had ostensibly respectable origins in Scandinavian mythology, as a means of peace enforcement. The story goes that Baldr, son of Odin, had been killed by a mistletoe arrow given to Hodr, his blind brother, by Loki, the god of mischief.
To prevent recurrences, mistletoe then became the responsibility of the goddess Frigga, who ensured it could never again be used for evil unless it touched the earth, which was Loki’s realm.
The plant was thereafter suspended from ceilings. Hence the custom, according to Brewer’s, that persons passing underneath “give each other the kiss of peace and love in the full assurance that the epiphyte is no longer an instrument of mischief.”
The word “epiphyte” may be too kind, meaning as it does “a plant that grows on another plant but is not parasitic”. Mistletoe is very much a parasite, living off old apple trees and other hosts and occasionally, in the process, smothering them.
That was glossed over by the ancients, who considered it sacred and believed that any tree hosting it had been blessed by the gods.
Before the mythical Aeneas could enter the underworld to meet his dead father, for example, he first had to find a “bough of gold”: the ticket for which Charon would ferry him across the river Styx.
The golden bough, magically replaced on the host tree as soon as he plucked it, is generally interpreted to be mistletoe.
If it was revered in pagan times, however, mistletoe acquired a bad reputation among Christians. One tradition is that it lost its own status as a tree after being used in the crucifixion.
This helps explain why in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare calls it “baleful mistletoe”. It is also why the plant is rarely seen in churches.
Getting back to its use as an excuse for kissing at parties, one of the reasons that custom may never have caught on fully in Ireland is that plant itself is not native here and continues to be rare.
It was first reported in 1772, at Islandbridge in Dublin, and 70 years later was deliberately cultivated in the Botanic Gardens “where a viable, self-perpetuating population” still exists.
From there, it went forth and multiplied into neighbouring Drumcondra and beyond. But in other parts of Ireland where enthusiasts have introduced it, it remains sporadic.
In a 2008 review of records old and recent for the Irish Naturalists’ Journal, E. Charles Nelson gathered the sometimes charmingly detailed reports of local occurrences.
These included “a large plant in Clonmel [spotted] on the road from the bridge to the Minnella (sic) Hotel . . . high in a Lime tree directly opposite the girls’ convent about 100 metres on the left . . .”
A cluster in front garden near Queen’s University Belfast, meanwhile, was suspected to be the work of “an environmental science student who] had put a berry onto the cotoneaster after some Christmas revelry”.
Nelson noted that while “keen and curious gardeners had assisted Mistletoe to reach localities far from Dublin”, there was little evidence of natural spread, “except, remarkably, around Bunclody on the Carlow-Wexford border.”
The plant had meanwhile disappeared from the one site it had been previously reported in Cork.
An obvious reason mistletoe has not thrived here historically is that it requires a “thermosphere” for which Irish winters are too mild and our summers too cool.
On the other hand, Nelson pointed out, the plant has become firmly established in Dublin, where anecdotal evidence suggests it has increased “substantially” since the 1980s.
Climate change might be one explanation, he thought, although there were others. In any case, while the plant may be disappearing from Dublin’s office parties, it continues its gradual advance in the wild.