Where's the big, fat, jolly one from?

rubadub wrote:

How old are the people saying lapland? I never heard of lapland growing up, seems to be a very recent thing, great scam by the country, little heard of and an odd sort of name, must generate huge amounts of tourism. There was no question it was the north pole when I was growing up.

I have heard other stories about the origin, drug related. There is a hallucinogenic mushroom called the fly agaric (different to the ones recently banned, this one is still legal). The mushroom is the common toadstool seen in cartoons, very large with a red cap with white spots and white stem. It was said this is where the colouring came from (also rumoured to be the reall red apple in the garden of eden which some translations say came from a fruitless tree- i.e mushrooms, drug taking being the original sin).
Anyways the agaric grows in cold climates, a lot are in siberia (close to the north pole). In siberia the mushroom is eaten by locals, reindeers are particularly fond of it! Now for the sick bit, when you eat fly agarics the active drug muscimol passes through your system intact, so people would drink their urine to keep the buzz going! poor people used to call to the houses of richer users with bowls to collect their piss. Festivals were had that would go on an on, people recycling their piss over and over. The mushroom itself contains chemicals which can make you sick, so the urine is actually a purer high. People used to feed the mushrooms to reindeer and collect their piss after they had taken the nasties out.

The effect of the drug is to make you see things dimensionally wrong, things can be big or small, (again alice is wonderland is rumoured to be based on fly agarics, so is the whole elves and giant folklore). So santa was red & white, kept a load of reindeers and had little elves working for him. Santa is really getting wasted of rudolphs piss and imagining be is flying.