Thank you so much for the response to my Marie Boine youtube video. I have Sami Lapp ancestry on my father's mother's side and the rest is the typical Nordic Swede on his father's side. I don't know if it genetic or just preference, but the Northern landscape, icy cold weather and Nomadic nature of the Sami I find very appealing. I love the original way of life, complete with reindeer, of the Sami.
The original Santa myth out of Europe is an amalgam of many myths, but the Sami healer shaman dressed in red and white, representing the sacred amanita muscara mushroom, is much like how Sinter Klaus is depicted. And the reindeer...that kind of goes without saying:
Until just a few hundred years ago, the story goes, the indigenous Sami people of Lapland, a wintry region in northern Finland dense with conifer forests, would wait in their houses on the Winter Solstice to be visited by shamans. These shamans would perform healing rituals using the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria, a red-and-white toadstool fungus that they considered holy. So holy, in fact, that the shamans dressed up like the mushrooms for their visit.
Wearing large red-and-white suits, the shamans would arrive at the front doors of houses and attempt to enter; however, many families were snowed in, and the healers were forced to drop down the chimney. They would act as conduits between the spirit and human world, bringing gifts of introspection that could solve the family’s problems. Upon arrival, the healers were regaled with food. They would leave as they came: on reindeer-drawn sleds.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/in.../shaman-santa/
You tube video---"Santa is a Pyschedelic Mushroom"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrLb2-wETAQ
