Mistletoe: The Kissing Bough and the Druids' Plant
Also called kissing under the mistletoe, kissing bough, all-heal
Mistletoe is the evergreen parasite plant that hangs over doorways at Christmas so that anyone meeting beneath it may share a kiss. Its magic reputation runs from Pliny's Druids cutting it with a golden sickle to the Norse death of Baldr to Georgian servants' halls.
TraditionBritish Christmas custom with Classical and Norse lore
RegionBritain, then the English-speaking world
Era1st century CE lore; kissing custom 18th century to present
Moon☽ Waxing moon
DaySun
ElementAir
Difficulty●○○ Simple
Time20 minutes to hang; lasts the season
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
The working
Fetch the mistletoe in the days before Christmas and do not let it touch the ground, a rule borrowed from Pliny's Druids. Carry it in a cloth or bag.
Tie it with red ribbon, alone or bound into a ring of evergreens, and hang it over a doorway where people pass.
As you hang it, say a blessing for the house, such as 'Peace to all who pass beneath, and love to all who stay.'
Use the old rule: whoever meets under it may ask for a kiss, and a kiss is only given if both are happy to. A kiss on the cheek or a hug counts.
After each kiss, pluck one white berry. When the berries are gone, the kissing is done for the year.
Keep the sprig until next Christmas, when tradition says it is burned and replaced. Until then it guards the house.
Take care: Mistletoe berries and leaves are poisonous to people and pets: hang it out of reach and sweep up fallen berries. Never eat it or brew it. Kisses under mistletoe still need a clear yes.
Versions across time and place
i
The Druid oak rite
Gaulish Druids as described by a Roman · 1st century CE
Pliny says the Druids held mistletoe most sacred when it grew on an oak. On the sixth day of the moon a white-robed priest climbed the tree, cut it with a golden sickle and caught it in a white cloak, and two white bulls were sacrificed. They believed a drink of it made barren animals fertile and countered poisons. Pliny is our only source for the rite.
Uses: oak mistletoe, white cloth
Recorded in: Pliny the Elder, Natural History 16.95
ii
Baldr and the dart
Norse mythology · recorded 13th century
Frigg made every thing swear not to harm her son Baldr but passed over the young mistletoe. Loki shaped a dart of it and had blind Höðr throw it, killing Baldr. The common idea that Frigg then made mistletoe a plant of love is a modern embellishment with no medieval source.
English country-house Christmas · early 19th century
Irving's footnote explains that young men had the privilege of kissing the girls under the mistletoe, plucking a berry each time, and the privilege ended when the berries ran out. This counting rule is the one many families still use.
Uses: berried mistletoe
Recorded in: Washington Irving, 'Christmas Eve', The Sketch Book (1819 to 1820)
History
Pliny the Elder's 'Natural History' (c. 77 CE) gives the famous Druid scene: oak mistletoe gathered on the sixth day of the moon with a golden blade and a white cloak, followed by a sacrifice of two white bulls. No other ancient writer confirms it, and his source may have been the Greek traveller Posidonius, but it shaped every later image of Druids. In Norse myth, told in the Völuspá and Snorri's Prose Edda, mistletoe is the overlooked plant that killed the god Baldr.
The kiss is much later. A 1719 to 1720 study of mistletoe by Sir John Colbatch says nothing about kissing, and the earliest known mention is a song in the comic opera 'Two to One' (1784). Historians describe it first as a servants'-hall custom in late 18th-century England. Washington Irving's Sketch Book (1819 to 1820) and Dickens's 'Pickwick Papers' (1837) and 'A Christmas Carol' (1843) carried it into every middle-class parlour.
