This is the season of mistletoe kiss, one of the most romantic times of the year when you forget the stress and focus on romance.

As a woman who lives in a big city and comes from a small town, Netflix virtually promises that I should be meeting cute guys throughout the month of December. In reality, there’s arguably no less sexy time of year. My ideal holiday is taking a break from work, binge watching silly shows, eating a lot of good food and spending some quality time with my family (which usually involves a lot of talking, laughing and playing games). Still, if you have to go by what the movies tell us, the theme of Christmas and New Year is not “family” but “kissing”. 

Twinky lights, cozy vibes, mistletoe and decorated evergreens bring back personal memories and primarily those of your first kiss or the most passionate kiss (to be honest first kiss is usually not that great). Why do we think about kissing rather than sex? For someone as pragmatic as I’m, even I crave for some good old romance this time, something more in lines of “kissing under mistletoe”.

I’m not sure how this mistletoe kissing came to exist, there are many theories dating back centuries but the most exciting folklore is from Norse mythology. As the story goes, when the god Odin’s son Baldur was prophesied to die, his mother Frigg, the goddess of love, went to all the animals and plants of the natural world to secure an oath that they would not harm him. But Frigg neglected to consult with the unassuming mistletoe, so the scheming god Loki made an arrow from the plant and ensured that it was used to kill the otherwise invincible Baldur. Frigg cried a lot after her son died and her tears fell on the mistletoe reviving her son. Delighted, Frigg then declared mistletoe a symbol of love and vowed to plant a kiss on all those who passed beneath it. 

It’s a myth but I’m a sucker for Greek mythology and love this story. Whatever be the origin, I think kissing under a mistletoe is a beautiful tradition.

It all starts with a kiss, the passion you feel when the person kisses you can speak a lot about how the relationship can possibly go. Unlike sex which just curtails into an orgasm that lasts a few minutes, kissing serves a purpose of creating a more intimate bond with another person, it provides a feeling of attachment and comfort. 

Science has proved that kissing involves five of our 12 cranial nerves and when the nerves in the lips are stimulated they send an amazing amount of stimulation to the brain. Consequently, the brain’s somatosensory cortex is more stimulated by the lips than by any other organ (yes, even more than by the genitals). In fact, the legendary sex researcher Alfred Kinsey noted that some women can have an orgasm just from deep kissing (I’m yet to experience it but I’m sure that would be a kiss I will never forget). Actually, a Butler University study showed that more people remember the details of their most memorable kiss than they do when trying to recall the details of their first sexual experience.

Surprisingly, not every culture emphasizes kissing on lips, there are cultures that have other ways of being intimate. There’s the Malay kiss that Darwin described, where women would squat down on the ground and men would kind of hang over them and take a quick sniff of each other – take a sample of their partner’s scent. On the Trobriand Islands, off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, lovers kiss by sitting face to face and nibbling at each other’s eyelashes, although this one sounds weird but apparently it does the trick for them. What is important with lip-on-lip kissing and other types of kissing is that the moment is about sharing close, intimate information about each other.

I probably won’t have any mistletoe kiss moments this year, but if I’m ever caught standing under the mistletoe with my special one, I wouldn’t want to miss the kiss even if I’m 80!