Do You Really Want To Be Under The Mistletoe?
The Christmas season brings you to sing along to carols, light up your Christmas tree, align your crib and last but not the least, hang up the mistletoe. 2020 did a lot and one thing that it pushed me to do is read and so I read about traditions and customs. On a naïve December day, I decided to scroll through ancient Christmas tales but little did I know it’d be something ghastly.
A mistletoe as a supposed Greek tradition, is a symbol of love during Christmas, hung at the very center of the room under which people kiss their beloved. There are many tales around the origin and use of the mistletoe before and during the Victorian era Some of the tales that stood out are the ones of its roots, its use in Norse mythology and in England.
A mistletoe actually parasitically grows on trees and can result in a disease called, ‘Witches’ broom’ which leads to the growth of weak shoots in the tree. In order to get rid of it, you’d have to climb high up on the tree and ‘blast’ it with a shotgun. Yes, very vivid for something that is used during Christmas! An inner elf told me to stop reading but my inner Grinch, well it told me otherwise, and I’m pretty sure you already know who I selected.
According to Norse mythology, Balder, the son of the chief God Odin, was murdered by his blind brother, Hoor, with a mistletoe missile. I need to stop reading. Versions of the mythology give different accounts with respect to what happened to Balder, one of which claimed that he came back to life. His mother, Frigg, was said to have cried tears of mistletoe berries and then went on to label the plant as a symbol of love. I should have stopped reading.
And yet I continued reading. In some societies, the juice from mistletoe berries is used to trap small birds due to its adhesive quality. The sticky substance is placed on trees to which birds get stuck and can easily be caught by hand. Yup, should have stopped.
In England, the York Minster Church began to host a “mistletoe service” during which criminals from each town could visit the Church, bringing along with them a sprig of mistletoe post which they would be pardoned. It is said that they declared, “public and universal liberty, pardon and freedom of all sorts of inferior and wicked people at the minister gates, and the gates of the city, towards the four quarter of heaven.”
I shut the internet tabs after that…or did I? All I did conclude on was that maybe Christmas isn’t as whitewashed as we believe it to be. Nonetheless, it’s the most beautiful time of the year.
Khwahish Khan
