Tenbury Wells, on the Worcestershire side of the Worcestershire/Shropshire border, held its annual Mistletoe [Viscum album] Festival on Saturday 3 December 2022, the event starting with the crowning of the Mistletoe Queen at 11 a.m.  Bunches of mistletoe, tied with red ribbon, were attached to buildings throughout the town.

Throughout the day musical performances and story-telling sessions were held in the Pump Room, while Black Adder Morris put on energetic dance displays.  At 3.00 p.m. drummers and druids assembled outside Temeside House, now home of S.E.N.S.E, a ‘therapeutic centre and social club’, to lead people along a footpath beside the river to the Burgage, a grassy open space, for a druid ceremony, during which mistletoe was blessed.  A good number of the public attended.  This culminated with everyone walking back to Temeside House, where three druids descended to the River Teme into which a bunch of mistletoe was thrown, the idea being that it would wash downstream into the sea, and thus spread its blessings around the world.

Later in the day, after nightfall, the ‘Mistletoe Finale, Procession and Santa Parade’ brought out families and other townspeople to join in the celebrations.

Note received from Kathy Wallis, January 2024:  ‘We do the mistletoe ceremony every year in the woods at the bottom of my lane [on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall], when the trees are blessed and a huge bunch of mistletoe is cast into the river to take its healing powers around the world.  The mistletoe we use has been cut in Tenbury and brought down, although the small pieces which we distribute come from the russet [apple] tree in a friend’s garden near Plymouth.’

Updated 11 January 2024.