“There's something wrong with those trees,” I can remember thinking.

February in Jerusalem: the City of the Evening Star.

(Centuries of scuttlebutt notwithstanding, the name “Jerusalem” has nothing whatsoever to do with shalom, peace: really, how could it? The city was originally named for Shalém, the Canaanite god of the Evening Star.)

(Put that in your Abrahamic pipe and smoke it.)

I've gone up to the Rockefeller Museum to see their famous collection of Bronze Age Syro-Palestinian (“Canaanite”) art and artifacts. Clearly, an old olive grove stood here once: some tired, neglected old olive trees still linger frumpily around the edges of the parking lot.

There's something wrong with them all. Something is growing in them, something alien, something that you can't help but intuitively know shouldn't be there: balls of yellow-green leaves completely unlike the trees' own dusty-silver foliage.

Something intrusive, disturbing, eerie even, something that seems to shine with an uncanny light of its own.

It was the first time that I'd ever seen wild mistletoe.

On Mother Night, the Eve of the Winter Solstice, I will hang up a bunch of mistletoe in a doorway to signify the beginning of the Yulefrith, the thirteen-day peace of Yule.

Still, for all the holiday hype, for all its bright berries and fresh green in a season when everything else lies dormant and dead, let us not forget: mistletoe is a parasite, feeding its own vigor at the expense of its host's. Essentially, it's a green vampire, sucking the life-blood of its victim.

Put that in your pagan pipe and smoke it.