This is the Tom Hartman program.

So let's talk the real science of Santa Claus.

The guy in the red suit with the pointy hat, the white furry trim,

and the tall black boots with the eight flying reindeer's and the bag of goodies. It goes back to a

group of indigenous Arctic Circle dwellers, the Comchatolays, and the Coriacs of Siberia specifically.

But it's actually all the way around the North Pole.

We've had Steve Larson on this program before talking about the native people of Finland as well.

So Santa really does come from the North Pole.

On the night of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, a Coriak shaman would gather hallucinogenic mushrooms called Amanita Muscaria, or Flyagueric, in English is how we call them.

These are the red mushrooms with white spots.

Starting to see a parallel here.

The shaman would hang them on the lower branches of pine trees to dry them out before taking them home back to the village, or alternatively,

he could take them in and put them in a sock and hang the sock over the fireplace to dry them out.

Socks and fireplaces?

The problem with Flyagyrrach, or Aminita muscaria mushrooms, is that they are poisonous.

In addition to getting you high, they contain a

poison. And so the way that they would get rid of the poison is they would feed them to reindeer.

Reindeer love these things. And their livers have an enzyme that breaks down and detoxifies the

poison in this mushroom, but does not break down the halucinogen, which I believe is dimethyletriptamine,

DMT, in the mushroom. And so the shaman would feed the mushrooms to the reindeer, and then

follow them around until they peed and gather up that yellow snow, and they'd eat or drink the yellow snow as part of a religious ritual.

The reindeer, by the way, love these mushrooms. They eat them whenever they can.

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