NO WONDER PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE (IN SANTA, THAT IS)
In his book, “Still More Hot Illustrations for Youth”, Wayne Rice says this:
It is truly heartwarming to know that millions of people around the world believe in Santa. Sure, most are under four feet tall, but still it’s amazing that so many believe in the big guy in the red suit. Consider the following:
Around the globe, today, live approximately two billion children. Santa doesn’t visit all of them, of course. Subtracting the number of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children reduces Santa’s Christmas Eve workload to 15 percent of the total, or 378 million.
At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, and presuming there is at least 1 good child in each home, Santa must visit about 108 million homes.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth - assuming he travels east to west.
This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
That means that at each household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh…and get on to the next house.
For the purposes of our calculations, we will assume that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth. We’re talking about a trip of about ¾ of a mile between each household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles… not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
To cover that ground in 31 hours, Santa’s sleigh moves at 650 miles per second—3,000 times the speed of sound. By comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second… and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds) the sleigh must carry over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself.
On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. In air, even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with a mere eight or nine of them—Santa would need 360,000 of them.
This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons.
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance—this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth’s atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer would absorb
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