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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 half the

white free trim and the tall black boots with the eight flying rain deers and the bag of goodies.

It goes back to a group of indigenous arctic circle dwellers that come

chattelays 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 coriacs shaman would gather hallucinogenic mushrooms called

amonita muscaria or flyaguric 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 flyaguric or amonita 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

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