Life is about change, I suppose. I grew up in the country, more or less. My father farmed and worked in a factory until I was 16, when the farm failed. I was driving a tractor in the field and on the road when I was 10 and I drove a truck when I was 12. That made my mother angry, but it was a small town and there was practically no traffic, so it was not a problem.

          I went to college in a small southern city, but to me it was a huge place. They had transit buses and cabs and a full time police force and all of that sort of thing. After that, we moved to Miami, Florida. For a mid-western farm boy, that was a real change.

          After several years in Miami we left our church and returned to seminary. The place was the panhandle of Florida, and we were about as far into the country as you could get. I felt at home, sort of, but I still felt very much like a stranger in a strange land.

          The first thing we really ran into in our area was the decorating of graves. The cemetery behind our church had many graves that were decorated. When I saw my first decorated grave, I thought someone had vandalized the grave. Broken (but colorful) dishes lined the edges of the grave. A couple of unusually shaped and colored bottles were embedded in the dirt on top of the grave. The headstone had Christmas garland around it. It didn’t look anything like what I was used too. But, that was their way and their tradition. Most of the graves there were decorated with glass or sea shells. Once you got used to it, it was sort of nice.

          Another thing was at Christmas time. My wife and son and I drove into the parsonage driveway one evening after a day at the nearest mall. (60 miles away) There was a large bush that none of us could identify lying on our front steps. We assumed it had blown there from the nearby woods until we saw that it was tied to the handrail, evidently to keep it from blowing away. We had no idea what it was or why it was there. It was not potted, but looked to be cut from a larger bush or vine or something. Actually, it was ugly. We figured someone from the church had brought it by because it was tied to the rail, so we didn’t want to throw it away. We just left it where it was.

          The next day was Sunday and we dressed and headed across the yard to the church. One of the men was waiting for us on the porch of the church. He pointed back to the parsonage.

          “You know, you should take your mistletoe in. Someone is gonna steal a big one like that right off your steps during church if you don’t.”

          My wife looked at him and said, “Mistletoe? That’s not mistletoe.”

          The fellow looked at her as though she had uttered some black oath. “Well, Ah declare but it is. Ah shot it mahself.”

          My wife grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. When we lived in Miami I depended on her to fill me in on the subtleties of city life. Now, out here in the country, she depended on my life experience to explain country living. Certainly, in Cleveland people did not have to shoot the shrubbery. She didn’t understand why this man had shot the bush. She looked at me for clarification. Her look held two questions. First, she had always thought that mistletoe was a plastic ball of green that you put over a doorway at Christmas. So, she wanted to know if that was mistletoe and she wanted to know why one would shoot mistletoe. 

          As for me, I knew that we in the country didn’t go around shooting the greenery, either. At least not in Ohio. I was stumped. I was pretty sure the bush was not an animal of any sort, but sometimes we saw strange things there in northwest Florida. But it was definitely a plant, and, in my experience, plants were relatively docile and didn’t need to be shot. Whether or not it was actually mistletoe didn’t interest me near as much as why it had to be shot. So, I asked the question;

          “Why did you have to shoot it?”

          Folks there thought Marsha was a lot of fun. She was definitely a big city girl. She still thought being up close to a cow was the greatest of thrills. She would get so excited she would yell for someone to come and look at the moo-cow. A tractor in the field fascinated her. Having fresh vegetables and meat was a new experience that she would go on and on about. Like I said, they thought she was fun.

          On the other hand, the people there knew I was a country boy to begin with. They expected more from me than they did from Marsha. Our mistletoe shooter looked at me now like I must have been the imbecile son of a farmer.

          “Land sakes, preacher-boy (oh how I hated ‘preacher-boy’), how the heck else are you supposed to get it out of the tree?”

          A good question, I suppose. At least he thought it was, for it seemed to answer my question for him. He shook his head in bewilderment and walked into the church. I was left with another question, which it was just as well I didn’t ask. I wanted to know why you didn’t just cut the mistletoe off the bottom of the mistletoe tree?

          That afternoon I looked up information on mistletoe. As it happens, it is a parasite plant that grows in the top of a host tree. How it ever got to be associated with kissing and Christmas is something I never cared to learn. I do know that we had a hard time pulling that bush through the door and into the parsonage. We never did hang it up. We just kept it until we took the tree down and then we burned both of them in the backyard. The mistletoe was nearly as big as the tree, so we had a nice bonfire by which to remember Christmas, 1983.