A Christmas Cornucopia: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Yuletide Traditions

by Mark Forsyth

So kissing beneath the mistletoe isn’t pagan, and it isn’t a Victorian invention either. It started sometime between 1720 and 1784 and I don’t know why, and I never will for certain; although I can take a pretty shrewd guess that it involved a particularly lusty and inventive boy, and a particularly gullible girl.*

we need truth to have a date and a place. That way we can see it, like spray-painting the Invisible Man. We dress love up as a wedding, and death as a funeral, so that we can see them both. What is true at Christmas is true on Midsummer’s Day. But we cannot see it then. Truth, for us, must have its when. Truth must have its what.