Finals in school, maniacally baking cookies, watching relatives get drunk on eggnog, and (naturally) breaking into your mom’s closet to find out what’s in that huge bag. Doesn’t this sound like the holidays? Oh yeah, and don’t forget all that Ho-Ho-Ho nonsense with the big fat dude who’s in a red faux-fur pantsuit that breaks and enters all the homes with sleeping little children.
But what we never ask ourselves about aforementioned dude who needs Weight Watchers is: Just how does he do it? Is it even possible?
First off, there are no known species of flying reindeer. Of course, it’s guessed that there are 300,000 species yet to be discovered. While most of these ARE insects and germs, let’s not be pessimistic. (Maybe the sleigh is drawn by flying ants or something.)
Then there’s the fact that there’s, like, 2 billion children (persons below the age of 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t (appear to) cover Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, or Shinto (a bit religionist of him, don’t you think?) households, that reduces the workload to about 16%. Sure, it seems like a lot less, but that’s still about 378 million kids. At an average (census) of 3.5 children per household (I feel sorry for the half of a kid), that’s about 91.8 million homes Santa has to visit. It would be sad if we couldn’t assume that there’s at least half a good child in each household. I wonder- does he cover the penguins? Judging by the aforementioned amount of children (Yeesh, the human race breeds like bunnies) I don’t think he has the time. Speaking of which, time.
Jolly Old Saint Nick has roughly 31 hours of Christmas to work, factoring in time zones and the Earth’s rotation, if he travels East to West (which seems logical). Do you know what that works out to? 822.6 visits per second. See, for each Christian household with good kids, Santa has about 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh (and feed the parking meter), slide down the chimney, fill stockings, distribute appropriate presents under the tree, eat all the cookies and drink the milk (he must have strong bones), get back out of the house, get back IN the sleigh, and move on to the next house. Sounds fun! If we assume that these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed (even though they’re not), that’s .78 miles between houses. The round trip works out to about 75.5 million miles (Does Santa get Frequent Flier Miles?). That, and time for what we must all do every 31 hours, plus time to eat and stuff.
This means that Santa’s sleigh moves at 650 miles per second. That’s 300 times the speed of sound, if you want to think about it that way.
Now, the fun part: The payload on the sleigh. Assuming each child gets nothing more than a Lego set (about 2 lbs.), the sleigh would carry 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who’s, echemm, overweight. On land, your average reindeer can pull about 300 pounds. Even if these undiscovered flying reindeer could pull 10x the normal amount, Santa couldn’t do the job with eight flying reindeer, or even nine. Nope. He’d need 214,400 reindeer. I’ll state the obvious: That’s a lot of food. That increases the GSWR (Gross Sleigh Weight Rating- New term) to 353,430 tons, and that’s not even counting the weight of the sleigh or Santa.
You can thank a large amount of Google to this last fact: 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates a huge amount of air resistance. This would heat the reindeer (all 214,400 of them) up in the same manner as spacecrafts reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion Joules of energy. Did I say per second? Yes, 14.3 quintillion joules per second, each. To make a long story short (too late) they would burst into flame instantaneously, thereby exposing the reindeer behind them, and, to top it all off, create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team (all 214,400 of them) would vaporize in about 4.26 thousandths of a second. And dear Santa would be exposed to centrifugal forces 17500 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
So now you know what Santa goes through every Christmas.
In conclusion: Even if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’d be way dead by now.
(Hey, am I getting that pony this year?)
The Jeffersonian 
Funny. I saw this exact same thing posted on some comedy website or other last Christmas. Remember? We had that short talk about it in Ms. Kotur’s class.
Really? I don’t remember that. I wrote this about four years ago because I was bored over winter break and I was in Florida with my rocket-sciency family who were just like ‘Hey, write about Santa!’
I’d like you to calculate the caloric intact of all those cookies and milk and then compare his metabolic system to the average human. The guy’s gotta be some kind of World Champion Cookie Eater with a metabolism that is not of this earth.
Good writing. Ideas are a dime a dozen; making them work is the secret. This writing worked.
This was great! It was a really great story and I loved how you calculated everything. Great story Raiza!