Holiday Tips
If you bring live holly or mistletoe into your home for to deck your halls this Advent and Christmas, keep the following in mind to preserve the plants, as well as the people coming in contact with the greens:
• When purchasing holly, look for glossy, firm leaves. If berries fall off readily, the holly isn’t fresh. Also, avoid branches spotted with black fungus.
• Neither holly nor mistletoe can tolerate freezing. If used outside, holly will look horrible after the first freeze. But it can’t tolerate the heat inside, either. It will last only a couple of days. The best solution is to treat the holly or mistletoe as a fresh cut flower, keeping the plants in fresh water.
• If your Advent or Christmas gathering includes small children or even pets, beware that holly and mistletoe berries are toxic. Little red berries can tempt children, who might eat them. If you have children under eight years old, the best advice might be to opt for plastic versions of holly or mistletoe. Or pick off the berries. Most mistletoe will likely have lost most of its fruit by December. Holly berries can be replaced with artificial berries sold at craft supplies stores.
• One final caveat: Don your gardening gloves when working with holly. The poisonous berries aren’t hollies’ only natural defense; the leaves pack a prickly punch, too.
Copyright 2001 Catholic Exchange
A Sacred Plant
Pagan Romans celebrated a winter feast known as Saturnalia, during which holly was exchanged as a symbol of good will. When Christianity took root in the Roman Empire, Christmas replaced Saturnalia, and the holly tradition was forbidden. Nonetheless, Christians continued to incorporate holly into their Christmas celebrations and to represent the plant in their holiday art.
Around the world, holly plants have played ceremonial purposes in many cultures. Even the genus name hints at the mystique of the plant. Some link the word “holly” with “holy.” An English botanist writing in 1568 refers to “holy” and “holytree.”
Whatever the etymology, many cultures considered the plant sacred. The evergreen quality led the Druids of Great Britain to esteem holly as the sun’s favorite plant. This belief eventually evolved into the holiday custom of bringing holly into British homes during the Christmas season so that woodland spirits could hide in the branches and find respite from winter.
Europeans used holly to ward off witchcraft, evil spirits and lightning strikes. But the protocol for when and how to bring holly into a household varied greatly and contained much precision and even more superstition.
Germans call the plant Christdorn. They associated hollies’ prickly leaves with Christ’s crown of thorns. German legend holds that the holly berries originally were yellow, but were stained red when the blood of Christ was spilled during his crucifixion. In Germany, legend claimed that holly grew in the footsteps of Christ. Never mind that Jesus probably never set foot on German soil.
The Pennsylvania Dutch saw in holly’s white flowers a symbol of the miraculous conception of Christ.
British folklore claimed that a bird landed on the shoulder of Jesus as he carried his cross. When the bird plucked thorns from Christ’s brow, the bird’s breast was forever bloodstained and was thereafter known as robin red breast. In England and Germany, stepping on a holly berry is considered bad luck because the charitable robin prefers the holly fruit as food.
Another quaint old English custom was to place sprigs of holly on beehives in December in keeping with the custom of wishing even the bees a merry
Christmas.
The holiness of holly wasn’t a notion limited to Christians. Ancient Assyrians, Chinese, Persians and Egyptians festooned their altars, their homes and their bodies with holly garlands and wreaths.
A number of Native American tribes indigenous to the southeastern United States used holly medicinally in sacred rituals. Typically, the Ilex vomitoria leaves were roasted and added to water to make a black brew drunk to cleanse the body before ceremonies. Tribes also preserved holly berries to use as clothing and hair ornamentation. Native American women wore holly during childbirth to alleviate pain and provide protection.
These rituals are among scores of medicinal or superstitious uses of holly employed by cultures around the world, including widespread use in
South America, China, Japan, Africa.
A Holiday Perennial
“The folklore of hollies is fascinating to me,” said Ken Slump, plant records manager at the Denver Botanic Gardens. When asked why so much lore and legend would attach to a single plant, Slump said, “I’d be guessing, but I think it’s because it’s evergreen. It has dramatic foliage that catches your attention. It’s very obvious in the winter landscape, and I’d say that has a lot to do with why a lot of folklore springs up around it.”
Perhaps the contrasting colors of green and red sustain holly as a perennial ornament for Christmas.
And it’s befitting for New Year’s, too. In the Victorian English language of flowers that attached specific sentiment to individual plants, holly means foresight, making it a perennial favorite for the season that ends one calendar year and begins another.
Mistletoe is commonly considered a prop in a ploy for a kiss. For trees, however, mistletoe is the kiss of death.
The Dark Side
A parasite plant, mistletoe requires a living host. Birds are vectors of mistletoe infections, spread mainly after they eat and excrete the plant’s berries. Berries contain a single seed with a viscous coating and threads that, as Super Glue and Velcro, respectively, attach mistletoe seeds to host trees.
Infection deepens when the mistletoe employs its specialized penetrating structure forcing through the bark and into the tree’s living tissues. Then the mistletoe’s root system grows within the tree branch. The portion of the plant under which we exchange Christmas kisses begins to grow only after the inner root system develops up and down the branch.
The parasitic plant is a stealthy destroyer that decreases a host tree’s growth and increases the tree’s likelihood for disease and susceptibility to drought. In forests, because mistletoe accelerates production of dead and down trees, the parasite plant becomes somewhat of an accomplice to fire hazards in forests. And branches heavily laden with mistletoe tend to break off in storms or high winds.
The most common commercially sold mistletoe has leathery, oblong leaves typically yellow-green in color. The waxy berries of this evergreen range in color from a translucent white to a pale pink.
Like holly, mistletoe’s berries are toxic to humans. But birds, deer and cattle sometimes eat mistletoe berries as winter forage.
The Bright Side
Norse legend linked mistletoe with resurrection, life and love. Kissing under a suspended sprig at Christmas time might have derived from ancient
Druid rites. During certain moon phases, Druid priests used golden sickles to cut mistletoe from oak groves. The Druids considered it bad luck to let the mistletoe touch the earth in which it did not grow. In the eerie ritual, priests placed the mistletoe on straw altars on which they sacrificed a pair of pure white bulls. Afterwards, the white-robed Druid priests honored one another with gifts of mistletoe from the altar, and they embraced and kissed one another, congratulating one another in their successful rite to ensure good fortune for the future.
Celts credited mistletoe with magical properties and good luck, in spite of their belief that Christ was crucified on a cross made of mistletoe wood. Consequently, in the British Isles, mistletoe was known as Holy Cross wood. Monks in monasteries boiled the leaves for teas, and chewed on chips of the wood.
Mistletoe’s formerly reputed medicinal value has all but disappeared, though some herbalists, particularly in Europe, continue to use mistletoe.
Nonetheless, today's most popular contemporary usage remains in dangling a sprig of mistletoe to secure a kiss that might make a person feel better.
