I wonder if Santa Claus likes mushrooms. I do. I even have created a ceramics series to celebrate that: The Mushroom Gatherers. This work is one of those.
There is a theory that the red and white colours of Santa Claus originate from Siberian shamans who used amanita muscaria for achieving alternate states of consciousness. I personally have an inkling that they are actually the colours of Coca Cola, when the trickster side of Yule man was sacrificed to give room for commercial powers.
In Finland, we still call Santa Claus ‘joulupukki’ which literally means a Yule Bock. When I was a child, Joulupukki brought gifts but it also was a scary creature with grey fur, sometimes even horns, and a messy, long beard.
In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas visits us already in the beginning of December, and here he is still accompanied with a dark assistant Swarte Piet. There has been a lot of unfortunate mayhem about racism related to Piet, but originally he is Krampus, the trickster, not a caricature of a person of colour.
In old times, humour, tricks, and up-side-down attitude was part of the festivities. In some villages here, the Sinterklaas is still celebrated with a ceremonial theatre where especially young men have an important role in releasing the trickster energy.
If we forget that light doesn’t exist without darkness, if the trickster can never play around in a harmless manner, its power will eventually explode in a completely uncontrollable manner and break every single rule we have tried to set for order.
Sometimes I feel that it’s exactly what is happening in our world at the moment.
