Tiny Tuesday - Mistletoe

The Sun has stopped. The technical Winter Solstice is quarter to eleven tomorrow morning (GMT), but the noon Sun will get no lower in the sky now and will begin to rise again on Thursday. For three days our planet's tilt is at maximum, allowing no more than a tiny glimmer of daylight to push back the night's darkness. And then it all comes 'round again.

This time has been sacred, reverenced, observed, for as long as we can know. And of course when we talk about the pre-history peoples we can't know a lot. Caesar and a few early historians wrote about the Druids, and Pliny the Elder (23-79ce) wrote of their awe of the plant Mistletoe, and its use in rituals.

Mistletoe was also referenced in the Norse sagas, whereby Loki tricked Hodur into killing Balder with a mistletoe arrow, that being the one thing he was vulnerable to. But it is the Druid mythology which carries the plant through to Victorian and modern tradition, focusing upon the thick, white, juicy seed as a symbol of fertility, and it is for this reason we hang it up and kiss beneath it.

So, however you celebrate this midwinter, be it Christmas, Yule, Solstice, Saturnalia or any of the other religious and spiritual ways in which we watch for the Rebirth of the Sun, have a splendid time. It is a time when we remember our relationships, be they to our gods, to our family, or to our landscape.

Oh, I really must get on with pushing the BBC for a Druid "Thought for the Day"... and if you're south of the line, happy midsummer!!! :-)