Kissing under the mistletoe

Brand found that mistletoe was kept out of churches, where one sexton told him it had once been put up and the clergyman at once ordered it down, but that it was hung in state in the kitchen. Any girl who stood beneath it could be kissed by a young man, who plucked one of its white berries for each kiss. Archdeacon Nares added the charm that a maid who was not kissed under it at Christmas would not be married that year. By Chambers’s time most of the mistletoe sold in London came from the apple orchards of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.