Santa, Shamanta

December 22, 2012 – 10:54 pm

If you’ve seen Walt Disney’s Fantasia, which featured an animation of Tchaikovsky’s Christmas suite The Nutcracker, you’ll likely remember the fairy-circle of mushrooms performing the Chinese Dance. The mushrooms have white stalks, with red caps that are also speckled with white.

Such mushrooms are a common theme at Christmas, as we see in the assortment of images below:
 

 

 

 
This mushroom is the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. They grow in cool temperate regions all over the world, and have psychoactive properties.

So what do they have to do with Christmas? Thereby hangs a tale.

Posted by Malcolm on at 10:54 pm, filed under Curiosities. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

4 Comments

  1. JK says

    Ahoy there Malcolm, TheBigHenry!

    I noted your comment over on D&N the other day Malcolm – I’ve been asking Duff the same for some time. To no avail.

    But there is hope – maybe – but we gotta be quick!

    http://news.yahoo.com/despite-conservative-support-petition-deport-piers-morgan-still-213316378.html

    Posted December 23, 2012 at 2:29 pm | Permalink
  2. the one eyed man says

    Eat too many ‘shrooms and you’ll start seeing Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.

    Posted December 23, 2012 at 6:59 pm | Permalink
  3. TheBigHenry says

    According to JK’s link, eat too many ‘shrooms, you’ll start seeing Righty, the arms bear.

    Posted December 23, 2012 at 7:54 pm | Permalink
  4. JK says

    We’re getting there!

    http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-sign-us-petition-deport-143007980.html

    Posted December 24, 2012 at 12:14 pm | Permalink

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