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Are Dancer and Prancer Flying High On Mushrooms?
The history behind reindeer that prance, dance and fly
When little children ask their parents why Santa’s reindeer can fly, they’re sometimes told it’s because they get fed “magical reindeer food.” These “magic mushrooms” apparently grow where Santa lives. Where on earth would a story like that come from?
Not quite from the North Pole, but close enough. Across the circumpolar North, the psychoactive mushroom known as Amanita Muscaria grows abundantly beneath coniferous pine, spruce and fir trees.
Known for their distinctive red and white caps, these hallucinogenic mushrooms were dried, treated, and used for centuries by Shamans in Siberia and Scandinavia to connect with the afterlife. Do NOT try to contact your long-gone Aunt Gladys via Amanita muscaria. You are not a Shaman. These mushrooms are toxic to humans.
However, reindeer graze near conifers and eat these mushrooms, making them “prance and jump around, seeming to take flight,” says Camosun College instructor Nicole Kilburn in a YouTube video she made when a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a mushroom sparked her curiosity.
For the lowdown on why Dancer, Prancer, Rudolph and their buddies are pictured high in the sky in the Santa story, along with the ancient…
