One of the other singers in the women’s ensemble got it into her head that it would be fun to give away a little something to all the attendees at our Christmas concert this coming weekend. At first we were thinking about giving away cookies, but after considering the issues of various food allergies, and also the monumental task of someone having to find time to bake and decorate several hundred cookies by Saturday, we decided to go with something else – something that is very appropriate to the season; something that can be had for free, if one is willing to go out in the middle of the night with a ladder and some gardening shears and harvest it yourself.

So this evening she showed up at my house with the largest pile of mistletoe I have ever seen, lugging in huge sacks full, and we set up a little assembly line on the dining room table. She clipped off appropriately sized sprigs of mistletoe and slipped them into little plastic bags, and I formatted and printed labels and then sealed the bags closed. Occasionally one of us would have to take a sprig outside and remove a bug, and mistletoe berries have this annoying tendency to either roll madly across the table, or squish into an extremely gooey mess, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly. It was actually a lot of fun, sitting there at the table, rummaging through branches looking for the prettiest bits, chatting back and forth. By the time she left this evening, we were only about halfway done (even though we’d filled over 150 bags), and my color ink cartridge was running dry, but there was still plenty of mistletoe left and luckily I managed to squeak out enough remaining labels that we should be okay.

(A few of the cats were interested in the process, so I kept a pretty sharp eye on them, since mistletoe is extremely poisonous. But few of my cats are plant eaters, and they were far more interested in the fact that there was a new person in the house from whom to beg pets and attention. And after she left, lugging a still-sizable sack of mistletoe behind her, I immediately pulled out a broom and very carefully swept up every single bit of mistletoe I could find, and then Richard set the Scooba going to scrub up anything I left behind.)

Tis the season for Holidailies!