Jackie's Mistletoe

A Christmas Tradition

Jackie was busy; she had two young daughters who kept her on her toes. She had a part-time job which took up more time than she cared to admit, and she, of course, ran the home she shared with her husband and daughters. She loved to get out into the garden when she could.

She grew annuals for additional colour in the garden, much needed as her husband concentrated on vegetables in the majority of their long plot. She also loved to grow flowers for drying, Statice, Straw Flowers, and lots of grasses, Quaking Grass and Bunny Tails were favourites. Nice to use in dried arrangements. She liked to do some flower arranging in her ‘Spare Time’.

All nature interested Jackie; she fed the birds in her garden with regularity. So much so that there was one particular blackbird who would eventually learn to come and call out to her if she was a moment late preparing his dried fruit and crumbled digestive biscuits, preferably with grated cheese. She would always hurry out to feed him when he scolded her for being late, and he never felt the need to fly away from her.

One Christmas, she bought a bunch of mistletoe, having read something about how the plant starts to grow when a bird wipes the sticky seeds off their beaks onto the branches of trees. She decided to try to grow her own.

It’s only certain types of trees that can host a parasitic mistletoe plant, but luckily, one that could was growing in Jackie’s garden. An apple tree. She carefully slit the bark and wiped a seed from the centre of one of the pearly berries into the wound. She did this in three spots to give herself several chances of success.

Unfortunately, the berries didn’t take. She tried again the following year, this time wrapping a little gauze around the branch to hold the seed in place and protect the site.

The following Spring, she noticed with great excitement a pair of little propeller-like leaves growing from one of the spots. Her mistletoe had germinated!

It grew and grew, never seeming to cause any problems for the apple tree. Eventually, she proudly cut her first tiny bunch to hang in the hallway from a red ribbon. Her husband, John smiled and came to kiss her under the magical little bunch of happiness.

Each Christmas, the tradition was maintained as the mistletoe plant and the apple tree grew bigger, as did her daughters. Eventually, they could take their own bunch of mistletoe for their own homes.

Time passes, and the inevitable happens. The family home has been rented out for sixteen years, but every year, the oldest daughter has an arrangement with the tenants that she can go and harvest an armful of mistletoe from the apple tree. It’s still at a very convenient height and can be picked from the ground.

This year will be the last time. The contract has been signed, and a young couple will take ownership of the house and garden in the new year. They will make their own traditions, which may or may not include the apple tree and the mistletoe.

I will make one more pilgrimage to harvest this year’s bunch, for my lovely Mum, who sowed the seed all those years ago.

Happy Christmas, everyone and thank you for reading my Substack posts.