Consider what we actually do every December. We go out into the cold, cut branches from trees, carry them into our heated houses, and nail them to the walls. Then we hang up a parasite and kiss beneath it.
Described plainly, it is one of the strangest things we do all year. And the real history behind it is considerably more interesting than the version printed on the back of the garden-centre label, partly because a great deal of what everyone “knows” about mistletoe was invented rather recently by people who wanted it to be ancient.
Start with the plant, because the plant explains everything
Mistletoe is a hemiparasite. It photosynthesizes perfectly well on its own but taps into a host tree for water and minerals, which is why you find it lodged high in the branches of an apple or a poplar rather than rooted in the ground like a sensible plant.
Now imagine encountering it without any of that vocabulary.
Deep winter. The oak is bare, grey, apparently dead. And there, thirty feet up, sits a dense green sphere in full leaf, bearing white berries, attached to nothing that touches the earth. It did not grow up from the soil. It has no visible beginning. It is thriving precisely when everything around it has given up.
Birds spread the seeds, wiping sticky berries onto branches or passing them through and depositing them where they land. The English name preserves this indelicate fact: Old English mistiltan combines tan, a twig, with mistel, a word connected to dung. The plant that appears from nowhere was, in the plainest reading of its own name, the twig that grows from droppings.
A plant that survives the death of the year, arrives without roots, and stays green against every rule its neighbours obey. You do not need mysticism to understand why people paid attention to it. You only need a winter.
The druids: one paragraph, enormous consequences
Almost everything ever written about druids and mistletoe descends from a single passage by one Roman author.
Pliny the Elder, in Book XVI of his Natural History (around AD 77), describes Gaulish priests venerating mistletoe growing on oak, which he says is rare. On the sixth day of the moon they climb the tree, cut the plant with a golden sickle, catch it in a white cloth, and sacrifice two white bulls. He records that in their language the plant is called something meaning all-heal, and that they believed it conferred fertility and served as a remedy against poisons.
That is the source. All of it.
Two things are worth holding onto. First, Pliny is a Roman naturalist writing about Gaul, not an eyewitness account of Britain, and he was a famously enthusiastic collector of other people’s claims. Second, an entire industry of British folklore has been constructed on top of these few sentences, most of it in the last two hundred years.
The chief amplifier was James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1890) wove mistletoe into a sweeping theory of dying gods and sacred kings that captivated readers for generations. It is a magnificent book and it has been substantially dismantled by later scholarship. When you read a confident claim about what “the ancient Celts believed” about mistletoe, you are usually reading Frazer at second or third hand, not evidence.
Baldr, and the detail that got added later
The Norse story is genuinely old and genuinely striking. In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the goddess Frigg secures a promise from every thing in the world that it will not harm her son Baldr. She overlooks the mistletoe, considering it too young and slight to matter. Loki discovers the omission, and Baldr is killed by a dart of mistletoe placed in the hand of his blind brother.
It is a superb piece of storytelling: the one thing too small to swear an oath becomes the only thing that can kill a god.
Now for the part you should treat carefully. You will frequently read that Frigg’s tears became the white berries, and that in her grief she declared mistletoe a plant of peace under which enemies must kiss and be reconciled. It is a beautiful ending. It does not appear in the medieval Norse sources. It is a later addition, in the romantic style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, retrofitted to explain a kissing custom that already existed and wanted a nobler pedigree.
The myth is real. The tidy explanation attached to it is not.
Holly and ivy had their own quarrel
Long before mistletoe became the celebrity of the doorway, English tradition paired holly and ivy as opposites, and set them arguing.
A group of late-medieval songs stage a debate between the two plants, with holly cast as masculine, bold, and better suited to the hall, and ivy as feminine, clinging, and consigned to the cold outside the door. The exchanges are competitive and often funny, and they clearly belong to a world of seasonal contests between the men and women of a household.
The carol most people know, with its refrain about the rising of the sun and the running of the deer, was printed in the nineteenth century and collected from singers by folklorists in the early twentieth, notably Cecil Sharp. Its Christian reading of holly, with the prickle as the crown of thorns and the red berry as blood, is genuinely old in spirit and part of a long habit of finding doctrine in the natural world. That does not make it the plant’s original meaning. Holly was in English halls long before anyone taught it theology.
When did the kissing actually start?
Here is where the evidence gets thin in a way that is rarely admitted, and then suddenly gets very specific.
For a custom endlessly described as ancient, kissing under the mistletoe leaves almost no trace before the late eighteenth century in England. Then, quite abruptly, everyone is talking about it.
The clearest early description comes from Washington Irving, the American writer whose sketches of an old English Christmas did an extraordinary amount to shape how the holiday would be imagined ever afterward. In the notes accompanying his Christmas essays, published around 1820, he records the custom exactly:
“The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases.”
Washington Irving, notes to Old Christmas, from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819 to 1820)
Read that again, because two details are easy to skim past.
First, the location: farmhouses and kitchens. Not drawing rooms. This began as a custom of servants and working households, which is very likely why it went unrecorded so long. Nobody was writing down what happened in the kitchen.
Second, and far better than anything the modern version retains: the kisses were finite. Each one cost a berry, and when the berries were gone the bough was spent. Built into the custom was its own limit, publicly visible to everyone in the room, counting down in plain sight. That is a much wittier piece of social machinery than the free-for-all it later became.
The decoration the Christmas tree replaced
Before the German fir arrived and took over the English parlour, the centrepiece of an English Christmas was often a kissing bough: a hoop or double hoop of greenery, hung with apples, ribbons, and candles, with mistletoe suspended at the bottom, raised up in the middle of the room.
It was handmade, it was local, and it was thoroughly displaced within a generation or two once the tree became fashionable in the nineteenth century. Most people have never seen one. Something worth remembering the next time anyone insists that a particular decoration is the timeless and proper way to keep Christmas.
The greenery also had a leaving time. Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648) instructs households to take down the rosemary, the bays, and the mistletoe at Candlemas, in early February, and replace them with box. The old calendar knew when to stop as precisely as it knew when to start.
It never entirely stopped being a harvest
One last thread, still living. In Worcestershire, the town of Tenbury Wells has held mistletoe auctions since the Victorian era, where growers and buyers gather in the cold to trade the season’s cut. It is a working market rather than a pageant, which is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. Behind the sprig taped above your doorway is an actual orchard, an actual harvest, and people who get up early in December to bring it in.
What the real story gives you
It would be easy to feel that the ancient version, with the druids and the golden sickle and the weeping goddess, is the more magical one, and that the truth is a demotion.
Consider the alternative. A plant that turns green when the world turns grey. A Roman naturalist who wrote down a rumour that outlived his empire. A medieval poet setting holly and ivy against each other for a laugh. Servants in a farmhouse kitchen inventing a game with berries for counters. An American writer who watched all this, wrote it down beautifully, and thereby helped export an English Christmas to the world.
Not one continuous ancient rite, but layer upon layer of people responding to the same dark month with the same instinct: bring in something that is still alive.
That is what is hanging over your door.
Follow the story further
The evergreen that eventually displaced the kissing bough has a rabbit hole of its own: how the Christmas tree conquered the world follows it from German parlours to nearly every country on earth. And if the theme of a season that acknowledges the dark rather than papering over it appeals to you, try why the Victorians told ghost stories at Christmas.
Washington Irving appears repeatedly in this history because he shaped so much of it. For the literature that did the same work, our Reading Room keeps the great Christmas texts complete and free, with introductions and questions to take with you.
Every tradition has a story. This one is stranger, and better, than the legend built on top of it.
Sources and further reading
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XVI, on the Gaulish priests, the oak, the golden sickle, and the two white bulls.
- Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda (13th century), the death of Baldr by mistletoe.
- James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890), enormously influential and substantially challenged by later scholarship.
- Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819 to 1820), including the notes to the Christmas essays collected as Old Christmas.
- Robert Herrick, “Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve,” in Hesperides (1648).
- Cecil Sharp, English folk-carol collections, on versions of “The Holly and the Ivy” gathered from traditional singers.
- The mistletoe auctions at Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, held since the nineteenth century.