Paul Hetzler
The Advocate
If a certain fungus is not available this year, Santa’s sleigh will be grounded on Christmas Eve, and gloom will reign at the North Pole.
Sometimes called the fly agaric because it supposedly was once used to kill flies, A. muscaria is common throughout North America and Eurasia from temperate latitudes to the far north. If you spend much time in the woods, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this fungus. It’s actually a tree-root symbiont, taking a small amount of sap from tree roots, but greatly boosting their efficiency in return.
Fungi are always present in a forest, although we can’t see them. By weight as well as volume, the vast majority of any fungus is hidden underground, or in things like old snags, stumps and logs. The “body” of a fungus is the dense, often mat-like mycelium that you may find under the bark of a dead tree or if you chop into rotted wood. Its “arms” are threadlike hyphae that extend out from the mycelium in search of neat stuff to do, like talking to trees (we think) and eating small animals (well, nematodes).
Mushrooms are what happen when fungi get in the mood to make babies. They don’t scroll through “Timber” for a hook-up, though, or otherwise have fun reproducing. If a fungus has consumed lots of organic matter for energy and enough moisture is present, it pushes out some erect structures like ’shrooms or conks (a.k.a. brackets, shelf-fungi), depending on species. These are called fruiting or spore-bearing bodies. Tiny spores, zillions of them, rain from the undersides of fruiting bodies and are carried on the wind to germinate elsewhere.
The fruiting body of A. muscaria is big: Its domed cap is known to get 30 centimetres or more in diameter, though 8-20 cm across is more typical, and it stands 6-20 cm tall. Sporting a bright reddish (orange on occasion) cap studded with prominent white spots, the fly agaric is one of the most recognizable free-standing mushrooms in the world; it’s the big polka-dotted red mushroom of colouring books, garden statuary, and Alice in Wonderland.
A. muscaria has psychoactive properties, and for millennia has been ritually ingested by Siberian shaman. It is also eaten by wild reindeer for – well, flying, I guess. Comet, Cupid, and loads of other blitzed reindeer (or caribou as we know them) have been seen lurching about after they’ve selectively browsed these mushrooms.
Santa’s reindeer-powered sleigh entered pop culture in the late 19th century, which is no surprise given that reindeer have had a close relationship with humans for millennia. At least a dozen thriving cultures still rely on this species today, including the Inupiat, Inuit and Gwich’in of North America and the Sámi of Nordic countries and northwest Russia.
Saint Nick’s team is shown having antlers, even though males shed theirs in autumn. However, unlike other members of the deer family, female reindeer also have antlers, which they keep until after spring calving. Clearly, Santa’s coterie of coursers are females. It figures – that’s who does most of the work in our species, too.
Naming these animals wasn’t Santa’s invention. The Sámi, traditional herders of feral reindeer, name the ones they train to pull sleighs. But airborne gift delivery may have been Santa’s brainchild. He knew that reindeer leg tendons click loudly as they walk or run. It’s hard to sneak up on kids with nine reindeer making a racket like hail on a tin roof. Good thing someone told him about Amanita muscaria.
The name Amanita may ring a bell: A close relative of the fly agaric, Amanita phalloides or death-cap, made the news this fall when three people in Australia were killed by a vengeful in-law. Turns out she slipped a few caps into their stew. Native to Eurasia, the death-cap was introduced to the Pacific coast and is now on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. Just a cap fragment can devastate one’s liver and kidneys, making organ transplant the only “antidote.”
But our cheerful A. muscaria, in addition to being hallucinogenic, can induce nausea. This unpleasant side-effect is mitigated by drying with gentle heat – high heat takes all the fun out of the fly agaric by destroying its mind-altering properties. In Siberia and other regions, A. muscaria was often placed in stockings and hung near a fireplace to dry. This way, the moderate heat rendered them (mushrooms, not stockings) OK to use. Maybe it’s just me, but the image of stockings full of red-and-white stuff, hung by the chimney (with care, presumably) sounds familiar.
If you’re skeptical about a fungus-Christmas link, search for “mushroom Christmas” online and you’ll get a bazillion, give or take a few, images of A. muscaria tree ornaments, cards, candle holders, wrapping paper, and you-name-it.
In Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s hilarious 1971 sketch “Santa and His Old Lady,” Cheech explains how the flying sleigh is fuelled by “magic dust” that Santa gives the reindeer, and then takes himself. Maybe it’s a reference to fly agaric – who knows?
Although it grows throughout most of Quebec, please don’t experiment with A. muscaria. For one thing, autumn-picked mushrooms are said to be up to 10 times stronger than those gathered in spring and summer. Also, potency varies by site.
From tree ornaments to stockings full of goodies, the fly agaric has inspired many of the secular trappings of Christmas. If Cheech and Chong are right, it could account for Santa’s unnatural jolliness, too. And we know it’s the reason Santa’s team are able to soar around the world delivering presents. But then, maybe the reindeer only think they’re flying.