Did Santa Claus Fly On 'Shrooms?

NPR, which seems determined to make everybody as grim and morose as they are, is now claiming that the Santa Claus legend resulted from the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.

Children across the land on Christmas Eve will nestle all snug in their beds to hear the classic poem "The Night Before Christmas." There's a parallel tradition on the Harvard campus at this time of year. Students and faculty gather to hear the story of Santa Claus and the psychedelic mushrooms.
I stumbled upon this curious blend of biology and fable during a wintry campus visit to Harvard's Farlow Reference Library and Herbarium a few years ago.

Curator and biology professor Donald Pfister greeted me in a majestic room, filled with glass display cases, folios and portraits. It's a short tour — no time even to peek into the rooms that contain 1.5 million specimens of fungi, algae, lichens, mosses and liverworts.
As we prepared to leave, we turned a corner, and there, in a glass case, was an odd assortment of artifacts: Christmas decorations shaped like red mushrooms with white flecks on them, Amanita muscaria, by name. There was also a Santa Claus, dressed in his traditional red robe with white trim.

While I was puzzling at this display, Pfister turned to a colleague, Anne Pringle, and mentioned that he was planning to make his annual lecture about the link between Amanita muscaria — which happens to be a hallucinogenic mushroom — and Santa.

The top photo above is of German Christmas ornaments which are clearly modeled upon the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria (below) from a University of Wisconsin website.