Holly balls are
a holiday tradition

At one point I referred to wanting to see the halls decked with "balls of holly."

"What you meant to say, moron, is 'boughs of holly,'" a thoughtful reader wrote.

No, what I meant to say was "balls of holly" because that's the way I've been singing it my whole life. Apparently, the first time I learned the song as a tyke, I heard the word as "balls" instead of "bough," and I've been singing it that way ever since.

You have to understand that little kids have no idea what they're singing about anyway. We had no clue as to what holly was, other than it came in balls (my friend Billy insisted it was "bowels of holly"), and we had no idea why you would want to deck the halls with the stuff.

According to the song, "'tis the season to be jolly," so we just assumed decking halls with balls of holly was a jolly thing some people did. Not that we did it in my house. I don't recall ever seeing holly, balls of it or otherwise. Later on, when I saw some plastic holly in a store display, the song made sense because there were little red ball-like berries in the holly. After that I sang "Deck the Halls" with even more confidence and vigor, belting out "balls of holly" with gusto.

Then when I got old enough to know about the birds and the bees, I began looking critically at the line in the song that says, "Don we now our gay apparel." And I said, hey, wait a minute. This is going a bit too far. I don't mind scattering the branches of an obscure evergreen around the house, but I'm not going to dress up like Boy George just to get into the holiday spirit.

WHEN I FINALLY got around to reading the words to the song, I realized it made absolutely no sense. It's like a bunch of drunks pieced it together one night after getting schnockered on eggnog. All the fa-la-la-ing hints that they really didn't work too hard at coming up with words for the song or couldn't remember them if they did. ("Deck the halls with balls of holly ... um, ah, fa-la-la-la, whatever ... oh yeah, 'tis the season to be jolly ... mmmm, help me out here ... fa-la-la-la-la-la-la bloody hell, what's the correct line?")

The song ends with the lines, "Sing we joyous, all together ... heedless of the wind and weather." Well, this just seems irresponsible. Drunken folks singing outside in the dead of winter on the mainland ... people could be frozen to death.

So, holly was mysterious to us as children. Almost as mysterious as mistletoe, except we actually saw mistletoe. It was a scraggly bunch of green stuff that would be taped over a doorway, and if you had the misfortune to accidentally stop underneath it, one of your more unappealing aunties (usually the one wearing the most lipstick) would sneak up and plant a big smacker on your cheek. Gross.

It turns out that "mistletoe" translates to "dung on a twig" because birds poop out mistletoe seeds in trees, and the parasitic plant grows there. How charming is that? The pagans believed mistletoe was a symbol of fertility. How a sexually charged pagan parasitic plant cultivated in bird feces became something you'd want to decorate your house with during the celebration of the baby Jesus and Santa Claus, I don't know. I guess it makes as much sense as chopping down a perfectly good tree and dragging it into your house to watch it die over a period of weeks.