'Twas The Night Before Christmas

From how the fly agaric fungus and its hallucinogenic properties might have influenced the image of a jolly, red-faced Father Christmas to cross-dressing in pantomimes, Octavia Pollock examines some common festive customs

ROUND and plump, garbed in red and white, glimpsed occasionally in early winter. No, not Father Christmas, but fly agaric, a mushroom noted for its hallucinogenic properties, which just may have contributed to the image of the gift-giving chimney scramble and team of flying reindeer.

Accounts of how Christmas customs began are legion. The legend of St Nick is said to start with the birth of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, in about AD245 in Byzantium—he gave away his money to those in need, anonymously. On hearing of three girls whose father couldn’t afford their dowries, he dropped a sack of gold down the chimney.

This legend could have given rise to stockings by the fire, but another theory traces the tradition to a joke by American writer Washington Irving. He was so keen to satirise John Pintard, who was obsessed with making St Nicholas patron saint of New York, that he constructed an elaborate hoax. It involved a missing Dutchman called Knickerbocker, who had absconded without paying his bill and leaving behind a mysterious manuscript, A History of New York, which weaves St Nicholas into every event.

The flying wagon and Santa’s entrance via chimney receive their first mention here, although the reindeer arrived, mysteriously, in an anonymous poem of 1821.