I was surprised to find out that mistletoe is a hemiparasite. It gets some nutrient from photosynthesis, but it mostly attaches to a host tree and can take so many resources that the tree can die.
Dwarf mistletoe, native to North America, is an invasive species. You can buy the seeds and grow viscum album, European mistletoe, as it’s not as damaging as dwarf mistletoe. Plus, it seems to get most of its nutrients from photosynthesis versus parasitizing its host. It’s still a hemiparasite though, and can damage other plants, though it mainly targets broad leafed trees.
I haven’t quite put the thoughts together in my head, but there’s gotta be some kind of tie-in between mistletoe, Christmas, capitalism, and the colonization of holidays.
I mean, people used to celebrate Christmas because it represents the birth of Christ. And the season chosen for Christmas was to piggyback on a pagan holiday season and make Christianity look more popular than it was at the time. And now people celebrate Christmas because it’s Santa’s birthday.
And due to capitalism, Christmas has pretty much become an orgy of consumerism. There are people that make whole videos showing off how thoroughly they spoil their children when it comes to gift giving.
Like, originally, Christmas was family and friends getting together to celebrate their love for each other. And the gifts were like an orange, some apples, a handful of nuts, a piece of candy, and maybe a small toy for each child. People would donate to charities and ensure that people weren’t starving in their homes or dying in the street ala The Little Matchstick Girl.
Then there was the popularization of Santa and the gifts he gives. So it’s no longer your family showing love and getting you something they can afford. It’s some mystical all-powerful father figure that can fulfill your every wish and desire because Santa is rolling in the money.
Like, you can’t ask for anything too big, because you don’t have to consider the financial state of your loved ones. Some magical being is going to fulfill your every ask, so why not ask for the biggest most expensive thing you can think of?
Once capitalism got a hold of Christmas, it ceased to be a Christian holiday and became the biggest shopping holiday of the year.
People go into debt to pay for Christmas.
And I have to wonder why.
There’s something so crazy about working hard for an entire year to pay off the credit card debt of the previous Christmas, just so you can use your credit again to pay for this year’s Christmas.
And that some people don’t even reuse their Christmas ornaments in the name of aesthetics. Like, when I was a kid, we would use the same ornaments year after year, adding new ones as we went along, so that we could carry forward our family memories as a kind of tradition. Now people are redecorating their entire houses for every holiday so they can impress people on social media and fulfill current trends.
It’s like, people are sacrificing real human connections in the hopes of impressing strangers on the Internet. And the key to that influence? Money. And money is capitalism, and capitalism is anti-Christ.
I mean, does anyone really think that the dude that believed that all debts should be dismissed after seven years is clapping and cheering over the idea of people going into ruinous amounts of debt ON HIS BIRTHDAY???
So in a way, modern Christmas is a bit of hemiparasite feeding on the original idea of Christmas. On one hand, it’s a celebration of Christ and community and family and loving the people around you, but mostly it’s a sacrifice of lifeblood–money–on the pagan altar of capitalism.
Because as long as we live in a capitalist society, money is needed to survive. The only people that don’t think money is necessary, are people that have some form of generational wealth. If things don’t work out for them, they can fallback on their inheritance or they can go knocking on their parents’ door. Meanwhile, the rest of us could get a little bit sick and have the long-term medicine be expensive and that will be the end of us.
When we live in a society where someone would prefer to immediately die in an accident rather than to be a slow financial drain on their family? I don’t think mistletoe or Christmas are the only hemiparasites around.
We could be photosynthesizing, but instead we’re cannibalizing. Socialism versus capitalism. It’s just that some people think mistletoe is super pretty. It has those cute little berries. (They’re toxic.)
~Harper Kingsley
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My mom was a child during the Depression, and that thing about presents consisting almost entirely of fruit and nuts, and a small toy, in the stocking is exactly how she described her Christmases.