UNLIKE many things we now consider part of the traditional Christmas, the practice of kissing under mistletoe predates the season's reinvention by the English Victorians, writes Frank McNally.
It was already well established by 1827, when John Clare described an amorous shepherd bracing himself to exploit the licence conferred by the magical plant: "The shepherd now no more afraid/ Since custom doth the chance bestow/ Starts up to kiss the giggling maid/ Beneath the branch of mistletoe/ That 'neath each cottage beam is seen."
My Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase Fablesays the custom is much older than that, "dating back at least to the early 17th century". And it takes a somewhat moralising tone on what it sees as latter-day breaches of the kissing etiquette: "The correct procedure, now seldom observed, is that a man should pluck a berry when he kisses a girl under the mistletoe, and when the last berry is gone there should be no more kissing."
The message here is that the powers attributed to the plant are strictly finite, rather like credit on a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. Use up one branch and you have to download another before proceeding. And this may have been our wise ancestors' way of preventing mistletoe-related excesses, because the plant's availability in Western Europe has always been in inverse proportion to its fame.
The bad news for lovelorn Irish shepherds is that mistletoe is rare in this country, especially in the west. It is not native, of course. Like the grey squirrel, it was imported here deliberately. But unlike the squirrel, it remains quite hard to grow.
Any mistletoe-sanctioned kissing in the wild this Christmas is likely to centre as usual on a "hot-spot" around the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, where the plant was first introduced circa 1804 and is still most prevalent. Beyond that, your best chance of finding it is in an orchard; and most occurrences seem to be in a north-south corridor along the east coast, from Waterford to Antrim.
There's nothing in the folklore that says you have to find the actual plant yourself, of course. You can always just buy it in a shop. But there must be many Irish people who have never even seen mistletoe, not to mind kissing anyone under it.
One might wonder why anyone would kiss under mistletoe, considering that the plant is a tree-dwelling parasite with a reputation for causing gastroenteritis when eaten, and that one of its possibly etymologies is from the German word mist, meaning "dung" (the explanation being that its seeds are spread by bird droppings).
It used to have a rather bad reputation, in fact, as Shakespeare records. A scene in Titus Andronicusis set in a remote corner of the forest, where a character complains: "A lonely and detested vale you see it is:/ The Trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,/ Overcome with moss and baleful mistletoe." And proper kissing etiquette apart, Brewer's also includes an extensive list of charges against the plant.
Its former infamy, says the dictionary, is "perhaps in allusion to the Scandinavian legend that it was with an arrow made of mistletoe that Baldur was slain, or to the tradition that it was once a tree from which the wood of Christ's cross was formed; or possibly [. . .] to the popular belief that mistletoe berries are poisonous, or to the connexion of the plant with the human sacrifices of the Druids".
That's quite a rap sheet - the last item of which may explain why churches are still reluctant to use mistletoe in decorations. But insofar as the plant has been rehabilitated, this was probably the work of the Scandinavians, who also seem to have started the kissing.
In Norse mythology, Baldur - the blind son of the goddess of light - was restored to life by his mother's tears, which turned into mistletoe berries. She then decreed that the plant would lose its evil properties provided it avoid contact with the ground: hence the custom of suspending it overhead and performing peace rituals underneath.
As for the druids, much of their reputed veneration for mistletoe stems from the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder who, in 77 AD, described them annually harvesting the sacred plant with a golden sickle.
The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Irelandis rather sceptical about this and the many fanciful theories it has since spawned. It suggests Pliny was talking about Gauls rather than Celts, and claims his tract on the subject "is responsible for more disinformation in British folklore than almost any other".
But of all the theories about mistletoe's powers, I prefer the simplest: that it thrives at a time of year when most other plants are dying.
The notion was well-expressed a while back by this newspaper's own naturalist, Viney the Elder, when he wrote that the plant's druidical significance probably stemmed from its "life-affirming crown of greenery at the peak of bare branches in mid-winter, and the semen-like promise of the juice around its seeds".
Yes, this is a memorable image. And even if you can find a bit of mistletoe to hang from your ceiling this Christmas, then, as Michael also suggested at the time, you might want to think twice about that kiss.