Many holiday traditions that are not explicitly religious often wind up attributed to pagans.  Easter eggs, Easter rabbits, mistletoe, jack o’lanterns… all these modern symbols of religious holidays that have pagan roots.  The Christmas tree also gets this association, but that isn’t entirely true. There are pagan forerunners to the Christmas tree.  A pagan tradition from pre-Christian Poland involved suspending evergreen branches from a house’s ceiling and decorating them with fruit, nuts, wafers, cookies, and other decorations.  This was thought to suggest and inspire good luck and prosperity. While this does sound a bit like our modern concept of the Christmas tree, this tradition is not thought to be the inspiration of the iconic holiday decoration that we think of today.  Evergreen has long figured into the season, though. Ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia (a festival that occurred during modern Christmastime) with wreaths of evergreen branches, whi...

The Ghost of Christmas Future shows Ebenezer Scrooge his own gravestone.  Happy holidays! Ghost stories have a long association with Christmas.  Of course we all know Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol , which dates all the way back to its first publication in 1863.  That was 175 years ago, but the tradition of the Christmas ghost story goes back much further than that. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol , he knew he had a hit on his hands.  The idea for the story came to him in the spring, and he got it all down on paper fairly quickly.  In truth, Dickens was drawing on a long tradition of Christmas ghost stories. Dickens’ ghosts were menacing only to the fictional miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who was only menaced by warnings the ghosts brought of Scrooge’s own future.  The story has a moral to it, and it gives Scrooge a chance to mend his ways before it’s too late. The four ghosts who visit Scrooge in the book are only terrifying to a man who, on so...

Once a year, tradition dictates that we head out into the forest and seek out mistletoe, which we then hang in our houses somewhere so we can trick people into kissing us by leading them to a spot underneath the plant.  This is great news for people with chronic halitosis or a compulsive affinity for garlic or some other condition that makes us less likely to get kissed, but for the rest of us, it’s maybe not such a boon. But how did all this start? Let’s start by defining just what mistletoe is.  Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant that grows in trees, usually.  The term hemiparasite means that it gets part of its nutrients from the host plant, but still provides some of its own nutrients through its own means.  Like other green plants, mistletoe can perform photosynthesis, turning sunlight into nutrients. It just can’t do that enough to sustain itself.  Though the mistletoe tradition comes from Europe, there are literally hundreds of different varieties o...