Most people's Mistletoe Season lasts just a week or two at Christmas – though this extends to a couple of months for anyone involved in mistletoe harvest and trade. For me it is, sort of, continuous throughout the year – it just gets busier in winter.
This summer has seen a continual trickle of mistletoe enquiries – mostly from landowners about how to manage it and from photographers shooting Christmas promos for retailers. The latter can be very frustrating – as what they want is mature, white-berried mistletoe in er, July. And that's not just difficult, it's impossible. But a lot go ahead with immature sprigs anyway – I suspect that Adobe Photoshop helps…
And, in the last few weeks I've been working on mistletoe website updates – you can see initial results at the usual places – www.teme-mistletoe.co.uk and its allied sites, plus of course my own, never-quite-finished site at www.mistletoe.org.uk. The entry page for that is due to be entirely rebuilt soon, and all the missing bits in the Mistletoe Pages section – and all by the end of September (in theory!). Plus a new Mistletoe Design website – with cards, posters etc. And more on management advice etc. I suspect these may drift into October…
Plus there are are the media enquiries – I already have a backlog of queries from journalists working on monthly magazine articles (may already be too late for some of the December issues now) and from broadcast media planning mistletoe features for programmes later in the autumn or at Christmas. More on those another time…
But that's all background noise really. The main season only really begins with mistletoe events – and I did my first one of the season last night – with Holford Gardeners Group in Somerset.
A good friendly event – only slightly marred by the computer projector dying halfway through. This worried me, a lot, as that beast was not cheap to buy.
So I was relieved to discover, after normal service had been restored, that it was simply the lecky running out – it just needed another coin in the village hall meter.