The Science of Santa

...a dispatch from bewilderness

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are way more than 1,000,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified and flying reindeer could be one of them.

2. Santa has 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 (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.

3. That means that for each eligible home, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, place gifts under the tree, eat cookie, drink milk, get back up the chimney and back in the sleigh.

4. In those 31 hours, Santa would travel 75-1/2 million miles at 650 miles per second, which is 3,000 times the speed of sound. Btw, conventional reindeer top out at 15 miles per hour (as opposed to 650 miles per second).

5. Assuming each child he visits receives just one gift — say, a medium-sized Lego set which weighs 2 pounds — the sleigh is carrying gifts that weigh 321,300 tons.

6. To propel 321,300 tons of gifts, Santa would need not the fabled 8 or 9, but 214,000 reindeer instead. That would increase the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Which is 4 times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth. Nevertheless, I believe in Santa and kindness and gifts.

7. Fyi, these numbers are based on Santa delivering gifts to Christian kids only, which I hope is not the case. If he delivers to Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or Jain or Sikh or other kids, too, the numbers would be way bigger and the world would be kinder, too.