A Hidden Life And Psychedelic Santa

    Documentaries are a very niche form of expression, one that doesn't always resonate well with everyone.  I, being one of those people, had a difficult time finding Op-Docs, or at least titles that seemed captivating enough to delve into.  However, I did find two pretty enjoyable ones that had quite intriguing titles,  The first one being Arctic Boyhood and Santa is a Psychedelic Mushroom.  While the latter seems to be quite an inappropriate idea, it was actually very informative on the origins of Santa Claus.

Arctic Boyhood

    If you were to ask a majority of people around the world what they believed the lifestyle of someone who lives in the Arctic Circle, I guarantee many would assume it is simply ice-fishing and that's about it.  Though, these Arctic peoples have lives just as complex and quite varied from a person who lived in a city their whole life.  This Op-Doc followed a young Greenlandic Inuit boy who was making his way into adulthood.  His grandfather (I presume) taught him how to weave a harness for his sled dogs so he could be more a little independent, and afterwards, the two go out into the open tundra to hunt for seals, another factor which leads to his coming of age.  The boy and his grandfather then return home and after dinner, the boy sits down with his grandmother who tells him a story.  Now this is where it became a little confusing to me, as the story, being about a boy named Qajaarangaa who lives in a village where all of the hunters disappeared and a lady invites him to her home where he finds dozens of human skeletons and disembodied heads, thinking quickly Qajaarngaa grabs a large knife and "in one fell swoop, he cut her head off."  The part that is confusing however, is what is shown during the story, whether it is a flashforward or possibly from the imagination of the protagonist, the boy is seen out in the tundra during a snowstorm approaching a lone shack with a large knife in his hand.  Either the story he was told had become real or it was symbolic of him truly becoming a man, whatever it may be, it had a very strong essence of the overarching theme of becoming an adult.

Santa is a Psychedelic Mushroom

    Now compared to the previous Op-Doc, this is as far from it as we could possibly get, rather than sending a message or telling a story of an unknown facet of life in out world, this is an origin story of one of the most well known mythological figures in the world, Santa Claus.  Off in the distant lands of Lapland, a sparsely populated tundra of Northern Finland, lived an indigenous group of people called the Sami who performed spiritual healing rituals led by shamans who used hallucinogenic mushrooms.  The mushrooms in question are called Amanita muscaria, many people are unknowingly familiar with it as it is the same mushroom that is eaten by the titular character of the Mario franchise.  This fungus has a very distinct and recognizable look to it, the crown being a bright red with small whit dots scattered across the surface.  These mushrooms which the Shamans used during rituals are highly hallucinogenic and along with the Shamans, the reindeer that pulled them from settlement to settlement were also affected by the fungi.  Identically to that of Santa, these shamans would ride around on reindeer pulled sleighs, so there is already a key connection between the two.  Along with that tidbit of information, two other points lead to the idea of Santa coming from these shamans, the shamans were believed to turn into these mushrooms, which are red with white spots, which is why Santa Clause wears a bright red and white suit.  The final factor is the effects of the mushroom itself, which gives the user a feeling of flying.  So, shamans clad in a bright red and white suit who is pulled in a sleigh by reindeer all of whom have a feeling of flying, sound familiar to anyone?