Viscum album "Phoradendron leucarpum" is used in North America in lieu of the European "Viscum album".) According to an old Christmas custom, a man and a woman who meet under a hanging of mistletoe were obliged to kiss. The custom may be of Scandinavian origin. It was alluded to as common practice in 1808 and described in 1820 by American author Washington Irving in his "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.": In Germany, the Christmas tradition is that people who kiss under mistletoe will have an enduring love or are bound to marry one another. Every year, the UK town of
What Is the Third Estate? What Is the Third Estate? What Is the Third Estate? () is a political pamphlet written in January 1789, shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the French thinker and clergyman Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836). The pamphlet was Sieyès' response to finance minister Jacques Necker's invitation for writers to state how they thought the Estates-General should be organized. In the pamphlet, Sieyès argues that the third estate – the common people of France – constituted a complete nation within itself and had no need of the "dead weight" of the two other orders, the first and second