Christmas, the Passion, and Saturn

Christianity absorbed the midwinter holly and reread it: the prickly leaves became the crown of thorns and the red berries the drops of Christ's blood, so that a plant of Saturnalia became a plant of the Nativity and the Passion together, fixed in carols such as The Holly and the Ivy. Culpeper assigns holly to Saturn, keeping the old Roman planetary link. The modern folk figure of the Holly King, battling the Oak King for the halves of the year, is a twentieth-century construction of the neo-pagan revival rather than an attested ancient belief. The berries, it should be noted, are toxic to people though eaten by birds. The tree's meaning across all these layers is constant: green life held up in the depth of winter.

The bright berries so central to holly's midwinter symbolism serve a real ecological purpose that helped select for their eye-catching red in the first place: they are a critical food source for thrushes, waxwings and other birds through the leanest months of winter, and a holly bush stripped bare by a flock of hungry fieldfares is a genuine, commonly observed piece of winter natural history behind the plant's much older reputation as a sign of life persisting through the dead season.