You’ll Love the Yule Kiss-Off

The last of the year’s shipments of a little green plant that, since the 17th Century, has been putting as much zip into yuletide parties as the stuff that’s served in glasses, were to be on their way today.

The shipper is a Santa Ana firm, and the merchandise is mistletoe, tied in tiny bunches with red ribbons and kept fresh in sealed plastic bags. The stuff has been mailed to markets in California, Canada, New England and just about every place in between.

“Today’s the end of the mistletoe season for us. Now it’s up to the kissers and smoochers,” said Lou Sangermano, owner of Holly Mistletoe Co., one of the largest operations of its kind in the country.

Sangermano, 45, began selling mistletoe when he was 10.

“My dad would take me out to the Irvine Ranch, and we’d get some, and I’d sell it on street corners,” he recalled.

Now he employs almost 100 workers, including a dozen men who spend about two weeks in late November and early December climbing trees to gather the crop, which usually grows in the uppermost branches. It then is trucked to the packing plant.

There, because Sangermano is a firm traditionalist, almost all the work of trimming, tying up and packaging is done by hand, to the tune of Christmas music and some rock and roll booming from loudspeakers.

Once the mistletoe rush is over, Sangermano’s workers turn to packaging and shipping orchids.

Sangermano said he has five mistletoe sites in the Mojave Desert near such places as Barstow and Victorville and is experimenting with ways to assure that he will always have a crop.

“We harvest only one site each year, and this gives each site a four-year chance to recover,” he said. “This year, we’re nailing a 1986 penny to each tree so we can record its progress in 1990.”

Mistletoe is an evergreen, parasitic plant with tough leaves. The female plant has small yellow-white round berries, while the male bears elongated pollen pods.

The plant has figured in various ceremonies, as far back as the days of the Druids in England, and always seems to have had some connection with love and respect.

“I read somewhere that, in Greek and Roman mythology, if armies happened to meet on a field where mistletoe was growing, they’d throw down their weapons and start hugging each other,” Sangermano said.

It also has been recorded that, in 17th-Century England, a man who stood under mistletoe could pluck a berry, give it to a lady and kiss her. Obviously, it had to be a female plant to produce a berry.

That tradition seems to have evolved to the advantage of both sexes so that today either a man or a woman can stand under either a male or a female sprig of mistletoe and expect pleasant results.

The half-million packets that Sangermano’s firm sends out each year could have some far-reaching effects.