How Eugene’s roadside mushroom may have inspired Santa

Bright red with creamy tufts on its cap, the fly agaric is a delight to see — even though the mushroom is anything but rare, popping up in parking lots and backyard corners throughout Eugene, Springfield and the wider Cascadia bioregion. 

I was admiring a particularly large one laid out among rows of gilled mushrooms at this year’s Mount Pisgah Mushroom Festival when a friend leaned in and whispered: “It inspired Santa.”

Skeptical, I pulled out my phone and found a U.S. Forest Service page backing up exactly what she said — tracing the lore to ancient Siberian solstice ceremonies that gifted the fly agaric. 

That week at our editorial meeting, I pitched the story. The room answered with awkward silence and wide-eyed surprise. And our editor looked like she briefly regretted giving me the festival ticket. 

But we ran with it. Because, really: Is this mushroom why Santa wears a red suit lined in white?

For weeks, I asked every researcher and forager who would indulge me. I leaned into all things mushroom factoids — including attending the sold-out talk by mycologist Paul Stamets at the McDonald Theatre. 

Stamets is long tied to the countercultural curiosity of fungi and, during his presentation, shared memories from his days with Ken Kesey and The Grateful Dead accompanied by liberty caps — a go-to mushroom for psychedelic effects.

The fly agaric is also hallucinogenic, but with sickening consequences that have sent people to the emergency room. Its mind-altering properties sit at the core of the Santa-fly agaric connection — something I learned while reporting on another mushroom: the matsutake.

While covering the wild matsutake trade — an Oregon market that once topped hundreds of dollars a pound before sliding from triple digits and is now further challenged by Trump-era tariffs — a scientist explained how fungi migrate.

Thomas Horton, a recently retired professor emeritus at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, told me how the mushroom likely moved into North America tens of thousands of years ago across a land bridge — now the Bering Strait — spreading from Eastern Asia into Alaska and down to North America’s Pacific Northwest coast, in vast underground networks of mycelium.

Trying to contain my excitement, I asked if the fly agaric followed the same path.

It did, Horton said. And he was already familiar with the historical lore of it. He had told the story as part of a class on ethnomycology, the study of the relationship between humans and fungi.

“There’s a lot more than just Santa,” Horton told me.

In the story, taking place before history was written, a shaman visits homes during the winter solstice, sharing either dried fly agaric or reindeer urine (the latter containing diluted compounds from mushroom the animals ate).

Snow blocks the doors, so the shaman comes in and out through the chimneys. And he rides a reindeer.

“They’re all tripping, and he flies away,” Horton said.

Whether this story actually played out that way, scientists don’t know. Anthropologists have not directly documented the practice with tribes such as the Tsaatan, a small group of nomadic reindeer herders living along the northern Mongolia–Siberia border. Though, as one National Geographic writer who visited the tribe wrote, “storytelling is reflective.”

That idea resonates with Horton as Western science reckons with Indigenous displacement and lost knowledge, from fire stewardship to plant medicine. He pointed to Robin Wall Kimmerer, his colleague at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, whose books like “Braiding Sweetgrass” and “Gathering Moss” helped bring traditional ecological knowledge into the academic mainstream.

“Basically her whole thing is how could we shut down an entire line of thinking, and say, ‘Only Western scientific thought is how you can know about these mushrooms.’ That’s not true,” said Horton. “There are stories out there that have real good strong meaning that can help with research.”

For now, the fly agaric’s seasonal tie hasn’t taken on that kind of influence, instead resting on the shelf with other Christmas tales that live more in imagination than in real life. Horton traces its arc into American popular culture to the 1950s, after Life magazine published an article and photo essay about fungi and cultures around the world, titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” 

As for “seeking the Santa mushroom,” I didn’t get the evidence any science reporter craves. But I did get a simple pleasure at the heart of lore: a good story carried in a whisper from a friend.