The very unsexy origins of mistletoe make kissing under it even more baffling now 💏 Quite how mistletoe has survived both Covid and the Me Too movement is something of a Christmas miracle ✍️ k8_lister for ipaperviews
For starters, the name mistletoe derives from the old English ‘tān’, meaning twig and the Germanic base ‘mix , which means dungQuite what happened to turn mistletoe from a medicinal plant with Christmassy overtones to something that allowed “hopping” men and women to kiss each other isn’t known
As with most of our Christmas customs, the history of mistletoe is long and mysterious, which is academic parlance for “we’re not really sure what’s going on here”. Even so, I will do my best to explain how mistletoe came to be associated with Christmas and kissing. Pliny goes on to describe how the druids would only collect mistletoe with a golden sickle, on “the fifth day of the moon”, after which they would sacrifice two white bulls to the Gods. He explains that “it is the belief with them that the mistletoe, taken in drink, will impart fecundity to all animals that are barren, and that it is an antidote for all poisons.”
Mistletoe was also found in the stomach of “Lindow Man”, a preserved bog body found at Lindow Moss in the 1980s. The body dates to somewhere between 2 BCE-ACE 119, which may mean he died around the time Pliny was writing.
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