SANTA CLAUSE: REAL OR MEMOREX

From Issue #5; December 10, 2010

Note: For the benefit of readers outside the United States, to ask if something is “Real or Memorex” is
to ask if it is Real or Fake.

Mission Control and Associated Presses –

This should be a “No-Brainer”. Almost everyone over the age of 7 knows that there is no Santa Claus. There. Done. Memorex. End of article.

However, a deeper look into this strange Christmas story yielded some even stranger discoveries. Apparently, Santa Claus is not completely vaporware. He is actually a Siberian shaman, who, in his role as a medium between the visible and spirit worlds, does indeed go from house to house, descending through chimneys, and handing out gifts.

Preparing the gift, and the gift.

What gift does the shaman hand out? This gift — the Amanita Muscaria, a psychotropic mushroom that symbiotically grows on the roots of the pine tree. This gift is found only under its boughs. (So why are you putting gifts under a Christmas tree, exactly?)

When the Amanita are harvested by the shaman, they are placed in the branches of the pine tree to keep them away from a scavenging, Amanita-loving scourge, also known as the reindeer. (Why does everyone venerate and decorate the Christmas tree, why is the Christmas tree a pine tree, and why do we wonder if reindeer really know how to fly?)

To settle the reindeer issue, we interviewed one.  When asked if they knew how to fly, the answer was, “Hä’ä”, which translates from Mongolian (Uyghur) to, “Yes”.  (Actually, the reindeer’s exact answer was “Hä’ä, hä’ä, hä’ä”, but that was dangerously close to “Ho, ho, ho”, so we shortened it.)

Reindeer Interview (Short version)

We assume this answer is contingent on what one means by “flying.”

On the night of the solstice the shaman ceremonially dresses in red and white, the colors of the Amanita, carries a sack of these mushrooms over his shoulder and descends through the chimney to deliver these gifts.

Santa & The Real Deal

Why use the chimney? Why not use the front door? Think about it: Siberia, yurts, the dead of winter, and notoriously bad snow removal equipment. There is no front door.

Yurts, and their winter entry

It’s either the chimney or wait for spring, and waiting for spring is not an option.

This ritual has to happen on the Winter Solstice.  It is a ceremony that celebrates the return of light and honors the only true light, the light of the God within.  Here, finally, there is a juncture that unites the Christmas celebration with this ancient solstice veneration. The light of God is the meaning for which both days are reverently laid aside, and the reason they became mixed in the human mind.

Not only have we ascertained that Santa Claus is real, but we have also determined that everyone knows it. Only through tapping into racial memory could you so scrupulously recreate every detail of this shaman’s journey. You drag pine trees into your homes, decorate them and place gifts beneath their boughs.  You honor the descent of the shaman through your chimney, place stockings at your hearth for gifts to be imparted (which the shaman also do as a means to dry the Amanita), and deck everything with pine boughs and wreaths tied with red ribbons. You are 100 percent faithful to this story, with the exception of one thing – the point of it all. If Christmas is irrevocably tied to a psychedelic holiday honoring consciousness via a sacred mushroom that somehow you deeply remember, what on earth are you doing at the consciousness-derailing, horrifically degrading feeding frenzy known as Wal-Mart?