I’m a “fun guy”

I wish mushrooms grew around here. That would mean there was at least a little moisture. And grass. And trees. Instead, I've had to settle for planting succulents. My two Desert Roses are doing awesome but I'm not home to take pictures of them, either. 😞
 
Here was the best of the mushrooms from today's walk about. A circle of LBMs. Not edible but pretty in the sunlight.
And here with an antler handled puukkoish knife.
 
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ALBATROSS on some kind of polypore, though I don't know the kind. This feels flexible and soft like a pancake but will turn all chocolate brown as it ages. The tree remnant that this one is growing on now, was still standing last year when the first iteration of this unknown species made itself known to me.
 
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I've been attempting to take a short hiatus from the forum, but the job we started on today afforded me a couple of opportunities that were too good to pass up. This was one of them...
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Upon arrival we all thought this mushroom growing out of the middle of a stump left by the power company was a lawn ornament.
 
Here is a kind of Christmas (well, really SOLSTICE) related MUSHROOM - from traditional history of the Sámi peoples that I found very interesting, especially the understanding of how "pagan" cultures influenced the celebration of Christmas. I think we all know that Christmas, as a festive season, was a blend of Christian beliefs "imposed"? overlayed with existing local cultural solstice traditions.

This from a SubStack blog I receive regularly ~
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For millennia across the European arctic circle around the North Pole, from Scandinavia through Siberia, indigenous shamans sought out red-and-white mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and dried them in socks hanging from their fireplaces.




The mushrooms contain a powerful psychedelic, Muscimol, but are also laced with compounds poisonous to humans. Reindeer, however, love to eat these mushrooms and, when they do, they behave oddly, as if their names were Dancer and Prancer.

Their reindeer livers metabolize and thus neutralize the compounds that poison humans, but leave the psychedelic Muscimol largely untouched. Thus, reindeer urine on fresh snow is powerfully psychedelic.

Arctic shamans, around this time of the year, would leave batches of dried amanita mushrooms out in the snow for the hungry reindeer, who consider them a delicacy. The shamans would then follow the reindeer as they danced and played (high on the ’shrooms), gathering the fresh yellow snow to make into a holiday grog.

The reindeer’s favorite food, the amanita mushrooms, look like the clothing shamans (and Santa!) wore, red with white trim and white spots. They’re rotund: you could call them “chubby.” Thus, Santa represents the mushrooms in arctic cultural lore.

Amanitas grow under pine trees because their mycorrhizae or fungal filaments that extend underground transport minerals from the soil into the roots of the pine trees, who return the favor by transporting carbohydrates from year-round photosynthesis in their needles back down through their roots into the mycorrhizae to nourish the mushrooms.

Amanitas are only found under pine and spruce trees because of this symbiotic relationship that keeps them both healthy. And to this day pine and spruce are pretty much the only trees we use to decorate our homes this time of year.

Indigenous European and Siberian Shamans and their communities would light their pine trees with candles, put a light symbolizing the north star (identifying the axis around which our world revolves) atop their trees, and consume their reindeer’s-yellow-snow drinks on these darkest nights.

Intoxicated — or allowed to enter the spiritual realms — by the amanita psychedelic from the reindeer urine, these ancient shamans used the powers of spirit and nature to fly into the sky to visit the spirit world and resurrect the longer and warmer days for their people, bringing back the “gifts” of spiritual illumination, healing, and the renewal of life.

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I couldn't find any amanita muscaria in my local woods but these below (unidentified by me - I call then fire shrooms) - here shown with my
BogdanS BogdanS FIREBUG puukko - as we must have knife content in a mushroom thread. 🥰
 
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