When I was growing up in the Missouri Ozarks, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas were always given over to the hunt for mistletoe — not for its well-known canoodling connotation, mind you, but for cold, hard cash.
As soon as the leaves blew down in late November, exposing the evergreen mistletoe clumps high in the oak trees that grew on the flinty hills and ridges, I’d be out with my favorite .22-caliber rifle and a handful of shells. I’d have been practicing my marksmanship to be able to hit the mistletoe boughs precisely where they attached to the tree in order to bring down the entire cluster without shooting the mistletoe itself to bits.
On a good day, I’d down a dozen or so big boughs that I would then hack into saleable twigs (each with a few white berries). I’d raid my grandmother’s sewing basket for red ribbon to festoon them and sell them to local markets and groceries for the princely sum of a quarter each. I’d buy a lot of my family’s holiday presents each year with mistletoe money.
Kissing under the mistletoe is a European Yule custom brought here by colonists. While their mistletoe was European mistletoe (Viscum album), our American version (Phoradendron leucarpum) was a close enough look-alike for transplanted colonials to keep the mistletoe make-out tradition alive.
Both the European and American species, after all, are evergreen hemiparasites. For most of their lives, they derive water and nutrients from their host tree, which they attach to with a root-like organ — the haustorium — that siphons off food and moisture to nurture the mistletoe.
Both mistletoes are members of the plant order Santales, named for their fellow hemiparasitic plant, aromatic sandalwood (Santalum), much used in perfumery and incense. Both have bright white berries beloved by fruit-eating birds.
European mistletoe is much larger than its American counterpart when fully grown and much more common. It’s a major winter food source for all kinds of birds, including the aptly named mistle thrush. It’s also a significant drain on the health of trees, especially oaks.
In Maryland, though, American mistletoe mostly eschews oak for red maples and is common in the coastal swamps on the Eastern Shore, where red maple is abundant. While Phoradendron occurs north into New Jersey, scientists have found that it can’t survive winters where the mean January temperature is lower than about 40°F.
A warming climate, however, means that American mistletoe is inching northward every year, especially along bays and waterways that moderate winter’s cold. Locally, it’s seen in D.C., Laurel, University Park, Riverdale Park, Takoma Park and Glenn Dale; a few winter hikes in the woods would likely turn up many more locations.
Mistletoes comprise a large group of some 1,500 mostly tropical species. One thing they all have in common is that their seeds lack a hard coat, which most flowering plants’ seeds have. Instead, their berries are covered with a viscous slime.
This is a clever adaptation to keep the seeds from falling to the ground, where they would invariably perish. The seeds need to fall into a crack, crevice or ridge on a branch of an appropriate tree species to make a go of it.
Sometimes this is accomplished when a fastidious bird wipes the gooey mess off its beak onto a nearby branch or trunk. Sometimes birds poop out the seeds in sticky masses or strings that adhere to branches or bark as they fall. It takes American mistletoe about a year to infiltrate bark and tap into a tree’s food stores; during that year, it’s on its own, photosynthetically.
Some etymologists believe this scatological natural history shows up in the common name mistletoe, believed to be a combination of Anglo-Saxon words for dung, mistil, and twig, tan — literally, “poop on a twig.” (That’s probably not something you want to share with your lip-locked partner as you’re rocking to the tune of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”)
The etymology of the scientific name is more suited to amorous discourse: Phoradendron comes from the Greek and translates as “thief of the tree,” while leucarpum means “white fruit.”
There is an historical connection between mistletoe in Europe and various pagan practitioners, some of whom revered mistletoe as sacred to the gods and would harvest the clumps at winter solstice with a golden sickle. European mistletoe berries gave rise to the Greek name that means “oak sperm,” while the Celts associated the white berries with the semen of their thunder god, Taranis. (Probably another tale best not told while bussing under the bough.)
One of the niceties of the mistletoe-kiss tradition that seems to have been lost in American translation is that for every kiss you claim, you need to remove a berry from the clump. When the berries are all gone, so, too, is the power of mistletoe to compel a smooch.
All parts of the Eastern and European mistletoes are toxic, especially the berries, so be sure to keep your kissing confined to underneath the bough instead of holding the sprig in your teeth between you and your partner.
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Rick Borchelt is a science writer, field naturalist, and garden and botany enthusiast. Reach him with questions about this column.