The strangest object at any Christmas party is the parasitic plant hung from the ceiling that licenses kissing. Nobody questions it, and its backstory runs through Norse myth, Druid ritual and the below-stairs politics of Georgian servant halls.
A god killed by a plant
In Norse myth, the goddess Frigg made everything in creation swear never to harm her son Baldur — everything except the mistletoe, overlooked because it grows on other trees rather than the earth. Loki, inevitably, weaponised the loophole, and Baldur died by a mistletoe dart. In one telling, Frigg’s tears became the plant’s white berries, and she declared mistletoe a symbol of love rather than death — anyone passing beneath it owed a kiss.
Druids with golden sickles
Separately, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder described the Druids of Britain and Gaul treating mistletoe grown on oak as sacred — cut with a golden sickle and caught in cloth so it never touched the ground. None of that involves kissing, but it stocked the plant with enough pagan mystique to last two thousand years.
The kissing is basically Georgian
The custom as practised — kiss under the sprig at Christmas — is generally traced to eighteenth-century England, and to servants’ halls before it climbed the stairs to the drawing room. By Victorian times it had rules: refusing a kiss under the mistletoe was held to be bad luck, which tells you a lot about Victorian parties.
Source: History.com
Modern etiquette, briefly
The Victorian bad-luck rule does not survive contact with a modern workplace, where the only sensible mistletoe policy is enthusiastic mutual consent or none at all. When the Christmas jumper goes too far covers the neighbouring territory.
For couples who arrived together
The rest of the Matching & Couples collection, for pairs who no longer need the plant.