A light Sunday morning snowfall coated the forlorn Bloor St. newspaper boxes clustered around the malachite-coloured lampposts, dangling branches of mistletoe. It was a telling, but feeble sign winter has arrived in a city so lovestruck with the autumnal vestiges of football season.

Doing its part, the Bloor Annex Business Improvement Area has installed 21 kissing stations along this now-chilly stretch of sidewalk, between Bathurst St. and Spadina Ave., until Jan. 3.

The lamppost mistletoe, though fake and surrounded by industrial-strength tinsel, is a sign of seasonal cheer, said Wade MacCallum, the BIA’s chair. One panhandler was inspired to ponder a question relevant in our wary times: “If a girl is standing there and a stranger gives her a kiss, is it in the Christmas spirit or sexual assault?”

On Sunday, however, few were stirred by romantic impulses. Reports suggest the primary occupants of the tight real estate beneath the lampposts have been late-night drunken revelers, streaming out of the strip’s many drinking establishments.

So this lonely reporter wondered if we’ve become too delicate during daytime and, perhaps, uptight about kissing for all to see, or if the mistletoe is simply out of pedestrians’ line of vision.

“We were oblivious,” said Dean Neu, whose wife, Claudia Quintanilla, was not familiar with the expectations associated with mistletoe.

So Quintanilla was educated. “I’m supposed to lean you over and do this,” Neu proclaimed, leaning his wife back for a smooch.

Later, on a shadier stretch of sidewalk, Liza Franses lightly cajoled her boyfriend, Liam Van Dusen, for a kiss under the mistletoe. She was rebuffed.

“If there were less people around, maybe,” the Scarborough man said. “It’s weird to me to do make-out sessions in public.”

The allure of the shy man is hotly debated in dating circles, but it has worked thus far for Van Dusen, who has dated Franses for two months.